How to prevent a field from being editable

Sometimes you want to have the user be able to see a field in the details tab, yet when they try to edit the record the field is not editable. It could be case that the field is populated through a trigger or something. Xataface doesn't provide explicit support for this with any attributes in the fields.ini, but the solution isn't that difficult. All you have to do is use the fields__permissions() method:

Note: This code goes into the delegate class of the table that contains this field.

Here the field I want to hide in the edit tab is called the Role field. Now we just return an array with the key=>value attribute of 'edit'=>0. What happens is the this array of permissions gets merged with whatever array of permissions the field normally has. So if the user is viewing the record, they would have view permissions which doesn't have any permission for edit. So by setting the edit permission we would be doing nothing. However, the real beauty comes when we are in the edit tab and we explicitly state 'edit'=>0, and thus the field is no longer editable, but still visible.