Learning XPages Part 24 : Linking to the Person document.

We now have a simple XPage to display a
persons information so in this section we will link to the XPage and pass
in a document UNID so that it knows which document to open.

Lets open up the content_location custom
control. You should see the table that we create in a previous part with
the repeat control inside the table so that each row of the table is repeated.
When linking one page to another there are a couple of different ways that
we can do it. For the phonebook I’d like the user to be able to click anywhere
on the row of the table to bring them into the person document. I could
convert one of the computed fields on the table into a link but that would
require the user to know they have to click only on the link, by allowing
them to click anywhere on the table it will be easier for the user.

What I’m going to do is add an ‘onClick’
event to the table row. Switch to your source view and find and click on
the <xp:tr> tag that appears inside the repeat control.

In the properties box below you will
need to go to the ‘All Properties’ tab and give the row an ID.

you should see your XPage source update
to reference the new ID

The reason we have to do this is so
that the onClick event has something to latch onto. Without the ID the
table row cannot be referenced by our event. With the <XP:TR> still
selected lets have a look at a new section of the Domino Designer that
we have not touched on yet. The ‘Events’ section. You’ll find it as a tab
next to the ‘Properties’ section.

The events section will show you all
the possible events that you can associate with a XPage control. We are
interested in the onClick event for this particular task so select that
event and have a look at the right side of the tab.

You will see that we have the ability
to write JavaScript code for the client side or the server side and on
the server side we can also select some of the simple actions that IBM
have provided for us. Lets try a simple action. Click on the ‘Add Action’
button.

A dialog box will appear and will actually
default for the task that we have in mind. We want to open a different
XPage so we select the name of the XPage and we wnat to open the document
for reading so set the target document as ‘Open Document’, there are also
options for for ‘Edit Document’ and ‘Create Document’. All we have to do
now it tell it what the document ID is. We will compute this value so select
the diamond and choose ‘Compute Value’ and in the script dialog box we
will use the following code.

If you remember we are inside a repeat
control and rowData is the variable that we can use to refer to the current
entry in the repeat collection that we are working with. rowData.getUniversalID();
returns the UNID for the current document and if we save our XPage and
then preview it in the web browser you will now be able to click on a name
in the table and it will load in the ‘Person’ XPage and show you their
details.

The URL bar in your web browser will
show you your simple action and the DocumentID that your working with.

In the next part I’ll rewrite the onClick
action to put this information into the sessionScope and then use the values
from there in the person xPage instead.