Tuesday, August 14, 2012
Working with Data Fields

Data fields are bindings of fields to views.

Form views organize data fields in categories. Data fields are placed directly under the root of other types of views.

Data fields selected under c1 category of editForm1 view in the Categories controller in the Project Explorer for web applications.

Creating a Data Field

Data fields are created by using the New Data Field context menu option. For grid views, the option is available on the view node.

New Data Field context menu option on a grid view in the Project Explorer.

For form views, the option is available on the category node.

New Data Field context menu option for a category in a form view.

Data fields can also be created by dragging a field node onto the target view or category node.

Dropping a field node onto a view node in the Project Explorer.     Data field CategoryID has been created in grid1 view.

Arranging Data Fields

Data fields can be rearranged using drag and drop operations. Dropping a data field on another data field will place it after the target.

Dropping a data field onto another data field in the Project Explorer.     The data field CategoryName has been placed after data field Description.

Dropping a data field on the right side of another data field will also place it after the target.

Data field Description dropped on the right side of CategoryName data field.     Description data field node placed after CategoryName data field node.

Dropping a data field on the left side of another data field will place it before the target.

Dropping Picture data field on the left side of Description data field.     Picture data field has been placed before Description data field.

Dropping a data field on a different category within the same view will move the data field to that category.

Dropping Picture data field onto category c2 in the same view.     Picture data field has been moved into category c2.

Dropping a data field onto a different view or category will copy the data field. If the data field is already present in the view, it will be moved to the bottom of the list.

Dropping data field Picture onto view grid1.      The existing Picture data field has been moved to last in the list.

Creating Master-Detail Relationships

Dragging data fields can quickly create master-detail relationships between data views. Simply drag the foreign key field from the child view onto the master view. The relationship will be automatically configured.

Dropping a primary key data field onto the master data view.      The data views have been configured with a master-detail relationship.

Deleting a Data Field

Data fields can be removed using the Delete context menu option.

Delete context menu option for a data field in the Project Explorer.