Welcome to blog series part 10 of 17 on migrating Notes apps to DOCOVA. In this entry it’s all about “Refresh fields on keyword change”.
Ya, let’s take a moment to just love this one. Have you ever used it in your Notes apps? Refresh fields on keyword change was a bit of an odd beast, no? The purpose of this operation was to enable field options (or values) to be recalculated based on the change of a selection field.
For example, if you had one keyword field on a form named [State] and another keyword field on your form named [City] when you open the form you could get all the States as options to choose from in the State field keyword field, however if the City field was based on what State was selected, then you need to have the City field recalculate what list of cities to show to the user.
Notes forms accomplished this by using the “Refresh fields on keyword change” option. Although maybe you could argue that it worked fine in a Notes client, in a browser, the page reload, aside from super inefficient, would cause the page/form to jump back to the top of the page as due to the refresh. Traditionally, with JavaScript, you’d typically load up all possible options in some multi-dimensional array…fast…and not too complicated unless you needed to add a third or more selection fields to the mix. Ugh. A better way is to use an AJAX or JSON call to retrieve the new options.
In DOCOVA, keyword type fields like selection dropdown fields, checkboxes and radio buttons can all be hooked together in the App Builder so that they track each other and can independently get the options lists they need dynamically with no need for a “Refresh fields” option. DOCOVA leverages AJAX to accomplish this but the real convenience is the ease with which a developer can hook up this common form control functionality.
It’s a super convenient option in DOCOVA that I love. Chime in with your “Refresh fields on keyword change” encounters in the comments below.
You can fast-track and get all the whitepapers on our migration methodology and everything that is being discussed in this series of posts. Specifically, you can get the DOCOVA Notes/Domino Migration Methodology – MIGRATE whitepaper which goes over these technical aspects.
