Learning XPages Part 25 : Scripted Linking Between XPages
Tags : Lotus Domino XPages Scopes
Bookmark :
In the last part I showed you how you can create a simple action on the onClick event to link the single location list to the person XPage. In this part I'm going to write a serverside script instead of using the simple actions however before you decide this is the right way to do your linking there is one important caveat that you need to know before doing it this way....
Here's what the URL looks like right now for a document
You can see in the URL that the action and the document ID are part of the URL. If you bookmark this URL and then look at the bookmark at a later date then the link will work perfectly. With the method I'm about to show you I'm going to be using the sessionScope to store some values, these values disappear once the user closes their web browser and the URL will only say Person.xsp so a bookmark won't work so if you care about bookmarks then you need to make sure the values are part of the URL.
Lets open the content_Location custom control again and find our <xp:tr> tag that's inside the repeat control. We are going to look at the events tab again and select the 'onClick' event but this time we will use the 'Script Editor' instead of simple actions.
Because we already had a simple action in there it will ask if we are sure because changing from one to the other will wipe out any code or actions you have created. Go ahead and click OK and you'll see the script entry box. Here's teh script I'm using :
sessionScope.personDocID = rowData.getUniversalID();
context.redirectToPage("Person.xsp");
The first line sets the sessionScope variable called 'personDocID' to the UNID of the document that has been selected. The second line instructs the browser to open the 'Person' XPage. If we save and preview our XPage right now it will fail because we have not told the person XPage how to use the session scope variable. so just save and close the content_Location custom control for now and open up the content_Person custom control.
When we first defined the data source for the content_person custom control we did not specify a document ID. Go back to the data properties for the control and select the blue diamond beside the 'Document ID' part of the data source and select the 'compute value' option. The script entry dialog box will appear and in here we add the reference to our session Scope variable like this :
Now we can save our content_Person custom control and refresh our Xpage in the browser. Select a person from the location list and it should open up the person XPage for that person and while the document opens up to the correct person the URL bar will not contain any extra parameters
Congratulations. You now have the the basic phonebook application completed. You can view the list of locations, click a location to get a list of the people in that location and then click on a person in the table to get to the details about that person however we still have a few more things to do to make our application easier like make the person details screen look nicer, write some client side javascript to change the background color of the rows in the list of people so the user know which one they are hovering over and we also need to do something with our PlaceBar which has remained untouched till now. All this and more will be covered in the remainder of the series.
Bookmark :
In the last part I showed you how you can create a simple action on the onClick event to link the single location list to the person XPage. In this part I'm going to write a serverside script instead of using the simple actions however before you decide this is the right way to do your linking there is one important caveat that you need to know before doing it this way....
Here's what the URL looks like right now for a document
You can see in the URL that the action and the document ID are part of the URL. If you bookmark this URL and then look at the bookmark at a later date then the link will work perfectly. With the method I'm about to show you I'm going to be using the sessionScope to store some values, these values disappear once the user closes their web browser and the URL will only say Person.xsp so a bookmark won't work so if you care about bookmarks then you need to make sure the values are part of the URL.
Lets open the content_Location custom control again and find our <xp:tr> tag that's inside the repeat control. We are going to look at the events tab again and select the 'onClick' event but this time we will use the 'Script Editor' instead of simple actions.
Because we already had a simple action in there it will ask if we are sure because changing from one to the other will wipe out any code or actions you have created. Go ahead and click OK and you'll see the script entry box. Here's teh script I'm using :
sessionScope.personDocID = rowData.getUniversalID();
context.redirectToPage("Person.xsp");
The first line sets the sessionScope variable called 'personDocID' to the UNID of the document that has been selected. The second line instructs the browser to open the 'Person' XPage. If we save and preview our XPage right now it will fail because we have not told the person XPage how to use the session scope variable. so just save and close the content_Location custom control for now and open up the content_Person custom control.
When we first defined the data source for the content_person custom control we did not specify a document ID. Go back to the data properties for the control and select the blue diamond beside the 'Document ID' part of the data source and select the 'compute value' option. The script entry dialog box will appear and in here we add the reference to our session Scope variable like this :
Now we can save our content_Person custom control and refresh our Xpage in the browser. Select a person from the location list and it should open up the person XPage for that person and while the document opens up to the correct person the URL bar will not contain any extra parameters
Congratulations. You now have the the basic phonebook application completed. You can view the list of locations, click a location to get a list of the people in that location and then click on a person in the table to get to the details about that person however we still have a few more things to do to make our application easier like make the person details screen look nicer, write some client side javascript to change the background color of the rows in the list of people so the user know which one they are hovering over and we also need to do something with our PlaceBar which has remained untouched till now. All this and more will be covered in the remainder of the series.
