Rendering Data from Entity Associations in Form Pages
Enhancing Form Interaction: Utilising Lists for Rendering Entity Associations
When designing a Form page to manage a specific entity, it's often beneficial to enhance the user experience by incorporating additional information derived from related entities. To achieve this, it's crucial to define associations (also known as navigations) to the entity managed in the Form in your Data Model, view Table Links section for more details. Once this is accomplished, you can seamlessly integrate a List control within the Form page. This List control fetches and displays associated entities pertinent to the main entity managed by the Form Page.
Associations to the entity managed by the Form must be defined in the Data Model before they can be used in a List control on a Form Page.
For instance, within the User Profile Form page, the List control might be configured to showcase the user's most recent orders, providing valuable insights into their purchasing history. Alternatively, in a different context, it could be utilised to display communities or groups that the user is associated with, offering a glimpse into their social interactions and affiliations.
The versatility of the List control enables it to adapt to diverse requirements, making it an invaluable tool to enrich the user experience on the Form page. This tailored presentation of information enhances the page's functionality and aids users in comprehending and interacting with the entity more effectively.
The List control can be customised to match the design principles of your application. You can choose different layouts, styles, and interaction behaviours. By integrating the List control seamlessly into the form configuration, you can create an uninterrupted interaction flow. This will allow users to easily explore associated entities without disrupting their workflow.
It is important to ensure that the content displayed in the List is relevant to the entity being managed by the Form. This will help users find the information and actions they need quickly and easily.
Screen Controls used to implement Dynamic List
The section that follows outlines screen controls which are used to implement dynamic list rendering in form pages and their respective properties:
Entity Items
Query Filter This property specifies the query that must be applied when fetching the records for the list items. Templates can be specified to dynamically generate the query based on the current state of the application.
Search Fields This property specifies the fields that must be used for search operations (i.e. to filter the list).
Stale After
This property is no longer supported.
Entity Set or Navigation Property This property specifies the entity set or navigation property that the list items will be fetched from.
Target URL Prefix This property specifies the URL path that should be prepended to the page Data Path when generating the target URL for the list items. Templates can be specified to dynamically generate the URL path based on the current state of the application.
Single Item
Title The title of the list item.
Icon The name of the icon to be displayed.
Detail The detail of the list item.
Aside The aside content that must be displayed in the list item
Count
This property is no longer supported.
Image URL
This property is no longer supported.
Icon Image URL The name of the icon to be displayed. If set, this will be used instead of the icon value.
Page The page to navigate to when selecting a list item, should be in the following format:
./<page_name>Data Path Sets the Data Path for the Form. The value specified will be appended to the page name and page Data Path to form the Target URL for the list item. The value can contain templates.