Hi David,I've looked at doing that a couple of times now but it usually ends up presenting a few difficulties for something that is seemingly simple: 1. You're stuck with either using entities or view entities, I guess you could use a predefined list but that would defeat the purpose somewhat. My example below is a little boring but one possibly common example of where you might need more power is an autocomplete for a party name that could be either person or party group where the results of two entities need to be combined. You could call a service to retrieve the list in my example. 2. There is no way of indicating what field you actually want to search against. 3. There seems to be a common trend with auto-completers that they can be paired with an additional lookup form to allow for an advanced search, adding this capability to the drop down element only makes sense for an auto-completer.
In the end it seemed to me that while a drop-down and an auto- completer are quite similar, the differences between the two were enough to warrant a separate element (plus it's a damn sight easier :-)
Regards Scott On 22/11/2009, at 3:56 PM, David E Jones wrote:
Why not just use the existing drop-down sub-elements to populate the auto-complete drop-down. That has actually been my intention to implement, then an autocomplete drop-down could be implemented with a flag on the existing drop-down element, or with a new field sub- element which would use the same sub-elements as the drop-down element.I don't like the currently implemented form that requires you to implement an event that runs on the server in addition to defining the form field. Really with the information in the existing drop- down element you have all of the parameterization you need to implement a generic event on the server that could do a lookup based on the sub-elements of drop-down plus the characters that have been entered so far.-David On Nov 17, 2009, at 2:33 PM, Scott Gray wrote:Hi Bilgin,Sounds interesting I'll be sure to take a look within the next few days.As coincidences would have it I've also been working on a POC for ajax autocompletion which takes a different approach. I'm not done yet but should hopefully have something this weekend.The form definition would look like this: <field name="country><autocompleter result-field="countries" result-value-name="geoId" result-description-name="geoName"><field-event> <set field="geoName" value="${parameters.country}%"/> <entity-condition entity-name="Geo" list="countries"> <condition-list><condition-expr field-name="geoName" operator="like" from- field="geoName" ignore-case="true"/><condition-expr field-name="geoTypeId" value="COUNTRY"/> </condition-list> <order-by field-name="geoName"/> </entity-condition> </field-event> </autcompleter> </field>The field-event is then stored in the session and accessed via a generic request which runs the actions and returns a json result. The field-event tag allows the same elements as the actions and row- actions element so you can call scripts or services or whatever so long as at the end of it the field specified by result-field contains a list of maps.Regards Scott HotWax Media http://www.hotwaxmedia.com On 18/11/2009, at 3:17 AM, Bilgin Ibryam wrote:Hi all, I'd like to propose a way to add ajax support for lookup fields. For that purpose I created a small POC code, where you can test it https://issues.apache.org/jira/browse/OFBIZ-3211The idea is to add ajax autocompleter by default to all lookup fields (generated from form widgets), which gets activated whenever the user types some letters in the lookup field. To retrieve the data is used the same url and screen as the lookup, but with an extra parameter indicating that it is an ajax request.Then on the server side, the only needed change is to add 4 lines of code to each lookup screen which we want to have ajax support. This extension doesn't affect the current usage of lookup button, which still can be used for advanced searches.There are still things to fix and tune up, but the code is stable enough to see it in action. To demonstrate that I added the 4 lines to LookupPartyName lookup screen. So after applying the patch, you can go to any screen using LookupPartyName lookup(this lookup is used in most of the party lookups, like accounting-> invoices, payments) and type some letters in party id fields.I'd be glad to hear your opinion on this. Regards, Bilgin Ibryam
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