Monday, March 16, 2009

Basics of a Custom Edit Screen in Wolf

To understand the basics of an Edit screen in Wolf Platform as a Service refer to my previous post here .

As mentioned in my previous post, an Edit Screen in Wolf Platform-as-a-Service allows the visual representation of your Entity.
All the Edit Screens in Wolf are contained inside an Entity. The Default Edit Screen gets created automatically everytime the user creates an Entity. However, a Custom Edit Screen needs to be created by the User.

An Entity can contain only a single Default Edit Screen. However, the user may create any number of Custom Edit Screens in the Entity. A Custom Edit Screen can use the fields defined in the Default Edit Screen allowing for flexible representation of an Entity and its fields/data.
It is important to note that the user cannot create any new fields in a Custom Edit Screen.

Lets consider the Entity below as our initial reference. The Entity "Orange" contains four fields defined inside the the Default Edit Screen - Color, Size, Shape and Price.

To create a Custom Edit Screen for your Entity, Right-click on the Entity name --> Select "New" --> "New Edit Screen"


It is mandatory to specify a name for the Custom Edit Screen.

To start using the fields of the Default Edit Screen in the Custom Edit Screen, you will need to create a tab and a section inside it.


To create a tab inside the Custom Edit Screen, Right-click on the Edit Screen --> Select "New" --> "New Tab"



You may optionally specify a name for this new tab.

To create a new section inside the tab, Right-click on the Tab--> Select "New" --> "New Section"


You may optionally specify a name for this new section.

You can then start adding fields to this Custom Edit Screen. To add fields in the section of the Edit Screen, use the point and click UI to choose the fields.

As you can see, only the fields defined in the Default Edit Screen are accessible as part of the Custom Edit Sceen. The User may only create a label field in the Custom Edit Screen.

The user can create as many Custom Edit Screens as he wants for flexible representation of Entity fields/data. However, there will be only a single Default Edit Screen that acts as the master repository of the fields for the Entity.
As an example, the User may create a Custom Edit Screen for holding all the dimensional data of the Orange Entity such as shape, size, etc. and another Custom Edit Screen for holding other information such as price, color, etc. The User can then link these two Edit Screens to different Navigation Items and restrict the user access to Navigation Items as per requirements.

Go ahead and try the power of the Custom Edit Screens and see how they can help you to design a more complete application.

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