How to prevent a viewPanel with category filter showing empty rows if filter is not set

Question

I'm having this categorized view displayed in a view panel where the category column itself is not shown. Instead I'm displaying a combobox above the viewPanel where users can select from all the categories available (see screenshot below). The combo is bound to a scopeVariable and is refreshing the viewPanel onChange. The viewPanel has a computed categoryFilter reading from the same scopeVar. That all works nicely.

Now I also have implemented an additional wildcard (*) value in the selection list which (if selected) programmatically sets the cat filter to NULL. This way I'm forcing the viewPanel to show all entries. Again, this works fine, but with the drawback that now the view is showing empty rows where the category entries would be shown normally (in the screenshot you see empty rows above each entry, with 2 entries for the category "edcom GmbH" obviously belonging to the same category; those aren't separated by an empty row):

One way to at least hide those empty rows would be through means of css coding. But I would prefer those rows not being rendered at all.

Can this be done at all using a viewPanel, and how? Or do I have to use other controls like a repeat or a dataTable maybe?

Thanks in advance,

Lothar

Answer 1

One "hack" (an ugly one I admit) would be to change your categorization column from Firma to Firma:"--All--" or Firma:"*" and then instead of setting the category filter to NULL you set it to "--All--" (or "*").

The double category hits the indexer, but should do what you need.

Answer 2

Obviously there's no easy way. So meanwhile I'll stick to this css-style solution:

In the view panel und All Properties - data I set var = "entry". Then, under All Properties - styling I set a programatic value for the rowClasses property:

if(entry.isCategory()){
    return "rowStyleHidden";
}
return "";

The style class "rowStyleHidden" hides those rows using

display: none;

Don't know yet how this turns out performance-wise, I'll have to observe this once I implement it in a copy of the real database.

Answer 3

You can also switch to a none categorized view, by having the viewname calculated based on the value in combobox.