Monday, May 23, 2011
Dynamic Client Expressions, Page Base, Resetting Cascading Lookup, etc.

This release of Code On Time web application generator includes several bug fixes and enhancements.

  • Annotations column rendering in Data Sheet view has been enhanced in all themes.
  • It is now again possible to click on a thumbnail of an image field in grid and data sheet view to download the original file stored in the database table column. The first click will activate a row. The second click will initiate the download process.
  • Visual Basic.NET version of generated applications will correctly handle extended upload/download utility fields File Name, Content Type, and File Size.
  • Check boxes are correctly rendered in form views with templates.
  • Read-only and static fields are not causing “Field value is required” error in the user interface when user saves a form even if the field is not set to “Allow Nulls=false”.
  • Client library includes significantly improved processing of Client Script expressions used to evaluate conditional styling and control field / category visibility. All data types are handled correctly. You can also use special JavaScript Date class extensions. For example, the client script Date.$within([RequiredDate], 5) will return true if Required Date is within 5 days as of now. The client script Date.$pastDue([ShipDate], [RequiredDate]) will return true if the ship date of an order is greater than required date or if a ship date is not specified and the time to ship the order has passed. This type of expressions may be useful to specify conditional styling calling for attention.
  • Some enhancements to the system files of the code generation library were deployed to support the upcoming Azure Factory web application generator project.
  • Field property “Copy” now supports expressions in format FieldName=null to support clearing/resetting of cascading lookup fields when the value of the master field has changed. Read about configuring cascading lookups in Code On Time applications at http://blog.codeontime.com/2011/05/cascading-lookups.html.
  • All pages of the generated applications are now based on Namespace.Web.PageBase. This partial class will detect “right-to-left” cultures and switch the text flow to right-to-left from standard left-to-right. The class will also handle culture/language selection that will be enabled on the membership bar. User Interface Language selection feature will be available in the upcoming releases.