On Apr 16, 2010, at 9:20 AM, Jeroen van der Wal wrote: > The FindFacility screen only has a single dropdown box to select a > facility. We have +1000 facilities so need the "standard" way of > searching enities. Is there any specific reason not to have a > full-blow search form? >
This is an interesting subject. I guess that the main motivation for the drop down vs lookup was that most users use Facility to model a warehouse, and most companies that use OFBiz don't have too many of them. However it is true that Facility could be something else (like an office room) and there are distribution companies with several warehouses. I see here room for an enhancement to the framework to enable more flexible decisions; two options I can see are: a) create a new field widget type that renders as a drop down if the num of records is less than X; if greater than X then renders as lookup b) introduce the concept of a form field widget: the form field, e.g. "facilityId" is defined somewhere and then the field definition is referenced by all form definitions; a custom application could override the central definition of the field (e.g. from drop down to lookup) and all the forms using it will render the new one. Jacopo > Jeroen van der Wal
