Changing preferences in the conf.ini file

The conf.ini file there is a section called [_pref] which you can use set different preferences through the application. For example, show_search = 0 will turn off search. How this works is that the various template files the application uses has special "Smarty" tags which have a line of code like this:

{if $ENV.prefs.show_search}
// some code
{/if}

This example was taken from the Dataface_Main_Template.html file. The $ENV.pref.show_search line basically checks the conf.ini file to see if the preference show_search has been set to 0. If it hasn't, then it will show search.

Another example is in the Dataface_List_View_summary.html file (which is an alternative template to list view of a table) there is a line of code:

{if !$ENV.prefs.SummaryList_hideSort}

Notice however, that there is a ! symbol. So in order to actually turn it off, the preference must be SummarList_hideSort = 1.

This idea can be extended across all templates.

Changing the default template for list view

You can actually change the default template list view (or maybe any other template) by doing something really simply. For example, we can use the Dataface_List_View_summary.html file (it's in the Dataface/templates folder) to replace our normal view of the list. To do this, go to the actions.ini file (can be the application one or a delegate class one) and enter this code:

[list > list]
template=Dataface_List_View_summary.html

The code list > list just says inherit everything from the list action and then add this new code and call it the action list. We are just like overwriting the default list action.

And some we point our template attribute to the template file we want and volia!