A Flexible View Control for XPages Part 5 – Processing Selected Rows

The previous post in this series demonstrated how to add click events to a view created with the Flexible View Control utilizing the callbacks that are built into DataTables. But once a row (or rows) is selected, how do you actually DO something with the selection?

Getting a Handle On Selected Rows

There is a hidden field on the control that stores the @unid of the selected rows along with any other data the View Definition configured to return when selected (in JSON format). When the control is rendered, a class is applied to the field based on the “thisView” parameter given to the control.

Client-Side Data

In the demo we built in Part 4, we gave our thisView parameter the value “viewBasic”. This allows us to reference the selected row(s) client-side in jQuery with the syntax:

$('.fldviewBasic').val();

Using the demo from http://demos.xpage.me/demos/datatables-xpages-bootstrap.nsf/viewBasicCallbacks.xsp, when I select a row and examine the hidden field in dev tools I see:

What if I select multiple rows?

What if I want to return data besides just the row’s document id? To do so, I update the View Definition to tell it to return the columns I want when I click a row:

In this example, I want to return the ID and VIN columns in addition to @unid.

Important Note: By default, the @unid value is returned when a row is clicked. The Return Value of the View Definition overrides this value. Therefore, if values are entered in this field on the View Definition, @unid needs to be included if that value needs to be accessed.

Server-Side Data

The Flexible View Control also makes it easy to pass the selected rows server-side. The aforementioned hidden field is bound to a viewScope mapped to the thisView value.

To demonstrate, I’m adding a button to my example above that does a partial refresh on a panel and executes some server-side code to examine the selected rows:

Recap

The Flexible View Control for XPages makes it very easy to get a handle on the rows selected in a view and process that data both client-side and server-side

In the next post …

I’ll start to demonstrate the “flexible” part of the Flexible View Control by showing how a Domino view with over 2 million records can be mined to create different representations of data with the control through the power of the View Definitions.