filtering/searching on a repeat control

Question

In my application, i would like to replace a viewpanel with a repeat control.
However, part of the functionality is there is a UI aspect that allows users to select certain fields (that correspond to the view), and only display the documents that match. The view is doing a filter that allows users to select aspects of the view to create a search (the code is under search of the view) that allows the view panel to be updated with the results of the search.

one of the things that is curious is that the viewpanel has a value of "#{javascript:view2}" vice an actual view name.

The viewpanel defines the search view and the ...

I'd like to be able to apply that same functionality to the repeat control. I don't see those attributes on the repeat control... Any pointers? Its been a while since i've worked with xpages... long enough that I've forgotten a lot already....

TIA !

Answer 1

Read this blog post I did a while back, it should explain what you need.

The view panel doesn't filter anything, it just displays rows from a datasource, same as a repeat control. Indeed you can add components to a ViewPanel's column, pulling from the current row by adding a var property to the dominoView datasource.

The view is bound to #{javascript:view2} (which would be better done by binding to #{view2} - there's no need to call SSJS here). view2 is a dominoView datasource somewhere on your page. The datasource is a wrapper that has properties to capture the settings for filtering and searching that you want to do. At runtime, they are calculated and changes the ViewEntries in the datasource.

Finally there's is the underlying Domino View object available also to LotusScript. This holds and will always hold all entries. The dominoView datasource queries that using the filtering and searching properties and retrieves a ViewEntryCollection or a ViewNavigator.

So whether you use a View Panel, Repeat Control, Data View or whatever else, those are just components to visually represent a collection of ViewEntries or Documents. All can be bound to a dominoView datasource. Where repeat controls and Data Views give you extra power is you can bind them to any kind of collection, not just a dominoView datasource (e.g. DocumentCollection, ViewEntryCollection, multi-value field, Java collection, etc).

Answer 2

I often find that doing the searches in Java and then passing the results to the repeat as a List work better and allow more options. I can get all the information I need in Java and load that into a Map or Tree. This gives me the ability to do custom sorting in the Java class and also to combine data from other views/databases easily. Since the data is now in memory it gets reloaded fast. The only thing you have to watch for is the size of the data. If you have a view with many entries (10K?) you might not want to load everything into memory...

Howard

Answer 3

I'm not sure if you've found a solution yet, but consider using jQuery dataTables. Oliver Busse wrote a very detailed blog post about integrating dataTables into XPages.

To get the specific formatting, I used a repeat control to include the "td", "tr" and "thead" attributes Oliver listed in his blog post.