Display a 0 value

In Xataface, if the column in the database is of integer type and the row has a 0 value in that column then it would be displayed in the view tab. Normally this isn't a problem and actually nice because then it won't clutter up the screen. But sometimes you actually need to display this 0 value. To solve this, you can just use the field__htmlValue function to override the default function execution:



Here we have this field called 'single_conference_delay' which signifies how long it will take before the conference starts. And it's important to specify if it starts immediately like 0 days. This code will display it.

View the contents of a related record inside the view record tab

Say you have an abstract which belongs to a conference. The abstract to conference is a many-to-many relationship stored in a table. When you view the abstract record, you may have set the conferenceID to be a valuelist so that it displays the conference name.

Instead of just displaying the conference name, you can include an expando box beside the name. And if the user clicks on it, then the details of the conference appears and you can hide it again very quickly by clicking on the collapse button. For example:



This is a snippet of the view record of an abstract. You can see the conference name it belongs to and the expando box to the left. When you click it:



All the contents of the conference appear right. Very cool! So how does this work. It's actually pretty easy.

Start off by adding the field__htmlValue code to the delegate class (in our class it would be the Abstracts delegate class)



In line 2, we define our javascript file which will do most of the work for us. We will add this file in a bit. In line 3, we attempt to get the conference record from this record we have. You'll need to add another function to do this because the abstract record only has a conferenceID. So you can do this:



This will grab the conference record to use. Now in our scripts.js file, we add this:



And that should do it!

Getting related records

One thing you'll want to do is to grab related records in Xataface. Say for example, you have an abstract record that belongs to a conference. In the relationships.ini file of your abstract table, you would include something like this:

[Conference]
conference.ConferenceID="$AbstractConferenceID"

Where the conference is the name of the conference table, ConferenceID is the name of the index of that table, and $AbstractConferenceID is the foreign ID in your abstract record that corresponds to the the particular record in the conference table. Note the name of the relationship is "Conference."

In Xataface, if you have an abstract record you can quickly retrieve the related conference by simply doing this:

$conference = $record->getRelatedRecord('Conference')

This will retrieve the conference as a xataface_related_record object. It is important to realize that this is not the same thing as a xataface_record. If you want to convert this related_record object into a xataface_record object you can use the toRecord() function:

$conference = $record->getRelatedRecord('Conference')->toRecord();

This is a powerful technique that can save a lot of time.

Displaying Xataface record values

Taking a look at the Xataface Record API presents you with several techniques to display the values of the record. At the lowest level, there is a function called val and can be called like this (assuming $rec is a Xataface record)

$rec->val('fieldname')

What this does is it displays the raw value of field. As in exactly what is stored in the database.

But what happens if the value is say a foreign key to another table say like a number of a company. We don't really want to display just the number, but rather the company name of the id. If a valuelist has been setup for this company_id in a valuelist.ini file, then you can easily display the field you really want by simply using the "display" function.

So say for example, in your application delegate's valuelists.ini file you have this:

[companies]
__sql__="select company_id,company_name from companies order by company_name"

So you are basically telling Xataface to use the company_name as a replacement for the company_id. Since this is the application's delegate, this valuelist is accessible by any table and can be overwritten the own table's valuelist. In any case, if in your other table you just call:

$rec->display('company_id')

Xataface will be smart enough to use the company_name in replacement for the company_id. This display function is also useful for database field types datetime, time, or date. If you were simply use the "val" function it would return the date as an array with keys "year", "month", "seconds", etc. And you would be left with having to piece together the information yourself. But by using the display() function you can quickly circumvent this problem.