Binding an edit box within a custom control to a form field programatically

Question

I have a notes form with a series of fields such as city_1, city_2, city_3 etc.

I have an XPage and on that XPage I have a repeat.

The repeat is based on an array with ten values 1 - 10

var repArray = new Array() ;
for (var i=1;i<=10;i++) {
repArray.push(i) ;
}

return(repArray) ;

Within the repeat I have a custom control which is used to surface the fields city_1 through city_10

The repeat has a custom property docdatasource which is passed in It also has a string custom property called cityFieldName which is computed using the repeat collection name so that in the first repeat row it is city_1 and in the second it is city_2 etc..

The editable text field on the custom control is bound using the EL formula compositeData.docdatasource[compositeData.cityFieldName]

This works fine but each time I add new fields I have to remember to create a new custom property and then a reference to it on the parent page.

I would like to be able to simply compute the data binding such as

compositeData.docdatasource['city_' + indexvar]

where indexvar is a variable representing the current row number.

Is this possible ? I have read that you cannot use '+' in Expression Language.

stwissel stwissel · Accepted Answer · 2012-01-26T00:11:40

First: you wouldn't need an array for a counter. Just 10 would do (the number) - repeats 10 times too. But you could build an array of arrays:

var repArray = [];
for (var i=1;i<=10;i++) {
   repArray.push(["city","street","zip","country","planet"]) ;
}
return repArray;

then you should be able to use

#{datasource.indexvar[0]}

to bind city,

#{datasource.indexvar[1]}

to bind street. etc.

Carries a little the danger of messing with the sequence of the array, if that's a concern you would need to dig deeper in using an Object here.

Binding an edit box within a custom control to a form field programatically

3 Answers