Creating multi-tabbed form.

Some objects may have large number of attributes and showing them all on one form may be impractical. It may look much better if attributes were split up into several logical groups shown as different tabs. While the Member object is not overly large we still prefer to split its attributes into the following logical groups:

1. Attributes that show personal details of the member (name, address etc)
2. Attributes showing current activity of the member (her current loans and reservations)
3. Financial transactions of the member – fees and payments
4. Loan history – all loans of the member

Each of these groups will be shown in its own tab on the “Editing” form of the Member object. In order to split the form in several tabs we need to define a form section for each tab (see also Form Sections). To do this we open the Member object for editing and select the “Editing” form on the “Forms” tab. AwareIM automatically creates a single form section for the form called “Main” where it puts all the attributes of the object by default. First of all we will make some changes to this default form section. We expand the node of the form and select the “Main” form section underneath it. In the list of properties of the form section we change the name of the form section from “Main” to “Personal details”. Then we double click on the section to edit it in the form section designer. We only leave the following attributes in this form section: MemberNumber, FirstName, LastName, Address, EmailAddress, Gender, DateOfBirth, Status. Then we click on the Save button and return to the “Form” editor. We now need to add another form section, so we click on the icon. We enter the name of the new form section Payments and double click on it to start form section designer. We leave the following attributes in the form section: Number, FirstName, LastName, Loans and Reservations. Note that we can use the same attributes in different form sections.

In a similar manner we create the form section called Payments with the following attributes MemberNumber, FirstName, LastName, OutstandingCharges, Fees and Payments. We will add the last section Loan History a little later.

We will now add the Loan History section. Note that we want to show only current loans in the “Current activity” section and we want to show all loans in the Loan History section. In fact, we want to show current loans by default in all forms of the Member object except the Loan History section of the “Editing” form. To specify that current loans should be shown by default in all forms of the Member object we select the Loans attribute of the Member object on the Attributes tab and click on the “Presentation” tab on the list of properties of the attribute Then we click on the “Record sorting/filtering” property to display the dialog. On this dialog we tick the “Filter” check box, select the “Custom query” radio button and click on the “Settings” button. We specify the single condition for the query:

Loan.Status = 'Current' 

Now we will open the “Editing” form of the Member object and add the new form section “Loan History”. We select the single attribute Loans to be present on this form section. We also want to override the default presentation of this attribute that shows only current loans to show all loans of a member. In order to do this we double click on the Loan History form section to open up form section designer and we click on the icon to switch from the “preview” mode to the “form layout” mode. We then select the Loans attribute on the layout of the form section and select “Record sorting/filtering” from the list of properties of the attribute. We un-tick the “Filter items” checkbox on the dialog that comes up to make sure that all loans are shown.

We have finished defining the multi-tabbed form – now every time the Member object is viewed/edited AwareIM will create a form with multiple tabs that a user can switch between.