Re: unclear understanding formBuilder getSelectOptions

Sarah Gray wrote:

I'm having usage problems (ie, lack of understanding) of how to successfully use getSelectOptions in FormBuilder. Perhaps I misunderstand the function itself? I think it is to display text options when you have a dropdown menu composed of options from a linked table. I have a form with a link to another table, the link is being read by the morchand.links.ini file [...]

I tried setting this in the morchand.links.ini file but was just guessing at semantics and I'm not clear how to set the ini file so that "For the display name of the option, it will try to use the settings in the database.formBuilder.ini file" -- since my app has many tables and not just one set_display_field.

Hi Sarah, normally, you won't need to use getSelectOptions() yourself - if it's called from outside FormBuilder, this usually is because you want to add some additional options manually to the generated list. If you are in a situation where many of your tables have different field names which should be used for populating selectboxes, just don't use the select_display_field option in the .ini file, but but a similarly named property into the dataobject that you want to display. Say, you generate a form from DataObject_A. DataObject_A has a link to DataObject_B, so a selectbox is created from the records found in DataObject_B. In case you have defined the option select_display_field globally in your .ini file, FormBuilder will try to find the defined field in DataObject_B to display the values in the selectbox. In your situation, however, you would put it as a new property into DataObject_B: class DataObject_B {

    ### Autogenerated code...
    var $id;               // Primary Key
    var $displayMePlease;  // Field to be displayed in selectboxes
    ### End autogenerated code...

    // Your new property:
    var $select_display_field = 'displayMePlease';

} Whenever DataObject_B is being used to populate a selectbox, the field "displayMePlease" will now be used to, well, display the records ;-) Even if you should have set select_display_field globally in your .ini file, setting it again as a property in your dataobjects will always override the global value. This way, you can define the most commonly used field name globally and only need to add something to those classes where the field name differs. I hope I was able to make this a bit clearer. CU Markus