or inline: equivalent to the styles you'd give to a or * How to tell the form what map or list to use * How to pass a parameter on to the "success" view when a form is successfully processed For example, suppose you have a "createNoteForm" form to create notes and when it finishes, you want to continue to "viewParty?partyId=${partyId}". How do you pass the partyId to the next view-map (viewParty) when the form is submitted? There's a trick to do this: And in controller.xml: The "viewParty" view-map will then be invoked with the partyId in the parameters. * How to call Java from within a display tag ex: For double quotes ("), use the xml directive " * How to set the length and maxsize of a text field * How to make a tooltip box appear above a field when hoving over it * How to mark a field as required Change the widget style to something that stands out and maybe add an asterix after the description. * How to create a drop down * How to specify default values for a drop down current="selected" tells it to make the current key selected, so if you're refilling out a form, a selected field will be selected again no-current-key-selected= is used to specify a default value. It can be a literal value ("USD") or a variable ("${currencyUomId"}) * How to make multi column forms ... ... * How to make a "multi" form to list and operate on many entities at once

use-row-submit "false" will invoke a multi service for every row. This is the default "true" will invoke a multi service only when the row is checked submitButton a single submit button at the bottom of the list target specify in controller.xml request-map controllerTarget to invoke serviceName once for each row according to use-row-submit * How to then pass just one field back to the multi-form What if you need to pass just one field to a multi-form, such as a facilityId? One way (maybe not the best way!) is to put into the form target URL, like this: target="BatchScheduleShipmentRouteSegments?facilityId=${facilityId}" * How to have each row of a multi-form be selected by default This is very tricky, but I saw Jacopo do it in commit r 448936, tried it, and it worked! You have to set it in the screen-widget in the section like this: * How to reference the description field from a related entity, such as displaying StatusItem.description when the field is statusId (and similar) me="statusId" title="Return Status" widget-style="selectBox"> by default this retrieves the description from the field named "description" - use description="" to format the output: the context will contain the entities fields and their values use key-field-name="primaryKeyId" if the field name is different from the entity's field name (e.g., the field is paymentStatusId but we're looking up StatusItem.statusId, so use key-field-name="statusId") * Using the sub-hyperlink to put a link next to display entity Here is an example where you can use display-entity to cross-reference data from a related entity, then put a link as well: * How to get a set of options from StatusItem table NOTE: This will filter by date if a fromDate and thruDate are present. Make sure that these fields are of type="date-time" and not "date", otherwise you'll get a mysterious class cast exception with Date in the error log. If you want to avoid the filter, you can specify: A good example of this is CustomTimePeriod which has fromDate and thruDate of type "date", but will crash unless you stop the filter by date. It's good practice to specify filter-by-date if the entity has a fromDate and thruDate just to make it explicit. * How to turn a field into a link Use the tag inside of ... with description= for the anchor text on the form and target= for the link to use. Use the target-type="inter-app" when the hyperlink goes to a different webapp (ie, from marketing to party manager). Ex: IMPORTANT: use XML notation such as & when entering HTML tag with special characters such as "&" * How to disable display/execution of a field with a condition use-when="true" will cause a field always to display. use-when="false" will cause a field never to display. use-when is interpreted as beanshell using the current beanshell interpreter context. You can test for variables from the screen widget that were defined with . You can also invoke Java methods that return a boolean true/false with something like use-when="com.mysite.MyClass.myStaticBooleanMethod(myParameter);" IMPORTANT: Due to the way beanshell works, testing "foo==null" will return true if foo has not been defined yet! This is because beanshell considers undefined parameters as "void", and void is not consiered to be null. You can see this behavior for yourself by executing this bsh: print("Is foo null? " + (foo==null) + ". Is foo void? " + (foo==void)); What if you have a list form and need to access a field from each member of the list? After some (rather blind) trial and error, we found that the magic word is "context", as in:
.... this will test "myField" in each element of myList in your use-when IMPORTANT: Also note that most other form-widget fields that accept ${} notation uses FTL markup language, not beanshell. This leads to situations where you have use-when="parameters.get("fieldName")" and later on, description="${parameters.fieldName}" * How to set the default styles of a form - headers/titles: - text: - tooltip: (tooltip is the text next to the input or display fields) * How to show a list of valid status changes OFBIZ uses the StatusValidChange entity to control valid status transitions. You can use the StatusValidChangeToDetail and your current statusId to control the list of status in a drop down, so the user doesn't try to make an illegal status change: This is from applications/marketing/webapp/marketing/contact/ContactListForms.xml Note that current-description tag here needs to be something like ${uiLabelMap.CommonSelectOne} - trying to lookup ${currentStatus.description} would just return the current statusId. * How to fill-in default values on a form will pre-fill an input form with the values from displayValue. Note that displayValue can either be a Java Map or an OFBIZ GenericValue. This allows you to add new fields to your display form from an OFBIZ GenericValue. Here is a neat trick you can do in beanshell (.bsh): value = delegator.findByPrimaryKey("SomeGenericValue", UtilMisc.toMap("keyField", keyFieldId)); displayValue = new HashMap(); displayValue.putAll(value.getAllFields()); displayValue.put("another Field", anotherValue); // etc. etc. context.put("displayValue", displayValue); * How to add some descriptive text in the middle of a form This is a hack, pure and simple. Let's say you want some text in the middle of the same form so there are separate sections to your form. You can create a "dummy" field with a description of your text and use CSS to make it look like a section divider: What if you need several lines of this spread throughout your form? Each field name is only displayed by the form widget once, so you'll need several slightly different field names, like this: * How to use the same field or value more than once on the form Let's say you need to display productId twice on your form, once as productId and once as the product description. The form widget will only display each field name="" once. You can explicitly set the 'entry-name' attribute (by default the 'entry-name' attribute is equals to the 'name' attribute) to make it display the same field twice. (Thanks to Jacopo for this tip.) * How to put in a lookup form with a widget button In the form widget, use the for the field: This will put a link to The screen appears to be just a regular OFBIZ screen widget definition. The typical lookup screen has two sections: a lookup fields form and a list-of-results form. The lookup field form is just a regular form, except the entry fields may use instead of to generate the Begins With/Contains/Ignore Case etc. etc. options next to the text entry box The target of this form should be the same as before, ie "LookupProduct" The list-of-results form is also just a regular list form with the display fields, except for the field which should cause a value to be set back on the original form, you need a tag with target="" attribute to call javascript:set_values() with the values to set, as in: or: Note that target-type is very important. It tells OFBIZ not to put the <@ofbizUrl> tag in front of it. * How to control how the lookups work has a default-option attribute and an ignore-case attribute. default-option is set by default to "like" but can be set to "contains", "equals", and "empty" ignore-case is by default set to "true" but can be turned off and set to "false". * How to reuse list form for both lookup and list 1. use the use-when directive to check if a field has been set (not just check for null, but actually for its value) 2. do a in the top-level decorator of both your LookupScreens.xml and your CommonScreens.xml * What if you have a list-name and list-iterator-name for list form? The list-iterator-name takes precedence over the list-name. (see ModelForm.java renderItemRows method.) * How to use FTL with form-widget Right now the best way is to tell the form not to generate the form header or trailer, and then use the screen widget to piece it together with some FTL. This can be done with a skip-start="true" and skip-end="true" attributes of * A word about error messages Sometimes you'll get a message like: org.xml.sax.SAXParseException: Attribute "widget-style" was already specified for element "field". (Error rendering included form named [MyForm] at location [component://.../MyForms.xml] BE CAREFUL! It may or may not be that particular form in that Forms.xml file. * How to select only the fields required for our target service from the input map If we get our data from a map other than the default, specify it with map-name="otherMap" * How to select only the fields in a given entity from the input map * Fancy formatting of list forms: see http://jira.undersunconsulting.com/browse/OFBIZ-655 for some examples of fancy formatting for list forms. Here's a quic example, * Paginated forms - for when your list is too large and you need [Previous] and [Next] to page through results. Note that pagination is automatic if you set viewSize and viewIndex in your screen and set the paginate-target in the form. The rest of these settings are for "customizing" your pagination: in your ftl to make the [Previous] and [Next] buttons jump to that part of the document rather than the top of the page. If you want a name other than Previous or Next, say for localization, or you'd rather use "<<" and ">>" instead, you can specify the text and the CSS style for the buttons with the -label and -style attributes. * How to select null values Sometimes you need to do a query like "SELECT ... WHERE value IS NULL". You can do this with entity-constraint in the form (or screen) widget by using a "null" which is already in the environment, like this: * List iterator and list Beginning with OFBiz r 7451 (after opentaps 0.9), the list-iterator-name attribute for is deprecated. list-name="" will now accept either List or EntityListIterator. If you are using the performFind name, the list-name must equal "listIt". * How to set the alignment for the content of a column in a list form* Use the field's attribute widget-area-style. For example, to right align a field: * You can add a special html characters pretty easily, like this: d