Developer Documentation

To start you off gently, let's create three single-column reference tables: one for each of the car parts listed in the Front of Vehicle, Rear of Vehicle, and Engine popups.

In your text editor, create the reference table declarations, and save them as an XML file with the name partsFront.refem, partsRear.refem, and partsEngine.refem inside the RockyJupiter folder:

The piece of code above declares a reference table with a single Column named part_name. The data type of the values in the column must be Text, and the column must have data (NotNull="true"). This is just what you need.

Launch the command line, and publish the c:\RockyJupiter folder to the Mobilengine Cloud. This creates the partsFront, partsRear, and partsEngine reference tables on the Mobilengine Cloud. Check for yourself: log in to the Backoffice website, and click the Input data tab.

Figure 70. The reference tables that you created and published, as seen on the Backoffice website

OK, you've got the schemas ready and waiting. Let's inject some actual data into these reference table shells.

Reference data can get into reference tables

It's the second option that seems the most interesting, right? Here's how to go about publishing one or more spreadsheet:

Fire up Microsoft Excel, and create the spreadsheets that will hold your reference data: they must have the same number of columns and in the same order as you specified in one of the declarations, and the columns need to have the same names. In our case this means you create three spreadsheets, each with a single part_name column that contains text data. In the rows, enter the car part names in the appropriate popup control, and add Spare parts kit to one or more of them to see if it shows up in your form.

Figure 71. The reftab.xlsx spreadsheet with three worksheets. Note the extra row to test the data binding.

Name the worksheets partsFront, partsRear, and partsEngine to conform to the declaration file, and save the spreadsheet as reftab.xlsx (so that you can use Notepad++ to publish it to the Cloud) in RockyJupiter.

Download the .xlsx here

Time for the mebt. This is your first time publishing a spreadsheet to the Cloud, so take note: whenever you are including a spreadsheet, you need to add its path to the mebt command:

c:\RockyJupiter>mebt run . reftab.xlsx
Service url: https://tutorial.mobilengine.com/services/comex/v1/
User: petar.hoyt@gmail.com
adding 'partsEngine.refem'
adding 'partsFront.refem'
adding 'partsRear.refem'
Create reference table 'partsEngine'
Create reference table 'partsFront'
Create reference table 'partsRear'
Reset integration settings
No changes for form 'vehicleInspection'
Import reference tables
Processing table 'partsEngine'
Rows added: 4, deleted: 0, modified: 0, empty: 0.
Processing table 'partsFront'
Rows added: 7, deleted: 0, modified: 0, empty: 0.
Processing table 'partsRear'
Rows added: 5, deleted: 0, modified: 0, empty: 0.
Done.

The mebt says Rows added: with non-zero numbers, so our reference table now has reference data in it. Let's go and link this data to a control in your Vehicle Inspection form.

A repeater takes a table value (a recordset in its aptly named recordset attribute), and dutifully generates its children controls for each record returned. When you first used a repeater, you simply stuck a table literal into the recordset: this time, you'll use the part_name column of one of your new reference tables, and wrap the segmentedbutton and the if in the popup controls inside it:

Mobilengine uses a modified SQL query statement to query table columns; note the required table alias in line 5.

You no longer need more than one segmentedbutton in the popup. As long as you reference the rows returned by its parent repeater (using its record attribute like before), the form will contain all the controls that it did before.

Modify all three of the popup controls so that they each reference their appropriate partsFront, partsRear, and partsEngine reference tables, save, and publish, not forgetting reftab.xlsx from the mebt command.

Success! The extra Spare parts kit row shows up as a bonus without you having to manually type it into the code.

Figure 72. The test row in the reference table is displayed as a segmentedbutton control inside the repeater

Having three reference tables that each have a single column with the same name seems like a waste. The car parts in your reference tables seem destined to be combined into a single table with a second column that determines the region of the truck they belong to. You could call the new column vehicle_region, and the combined table parts, for example.

Modifying a reference table means editing its declaration file. The second column is just like the first in everything but name:

A spreadsheet that conforms to the declaration is also necessary. Download and save the new reftab.xlsx to your solutions folder.

Figure 73. The input data spreadsheet for the new parts reference table

This is where things get interesting. You used the part_name column to generate the segmentedbutton controls - you could use the vehicle_region column to generate their popup parents! When you read 'generate', you immediately thought repeater, right? One that wraps around the popup in the previous version of the form, and generates a popup for every row in the vehicle_region column:

The nested repeaters have actually eliminated repetition: one popup and one segmentedbutton control is all you need, since both are now templates. Make sure that you insert the DISTINCT keyword in the outer repeater's query statement (line 5) to get rid of duplicates, and to modify the inner repeater's query (lines 10 and 12) to reference both columns of the new parts table, and to filter the query by the vehicle region returned in the parent repeater.

Save and publish vehicleInspection.fls.xml, parts.refem, and reftab.xlsx. Open the form and check that it still looks the same. You might not have obvious visual proof, but you've cut down on the necessary amount of code and done tons for the easy maintainability of the Vehicle Inspection form.