niota

To enable grid formats and grid end user experience to your needs there is the database (based) grid edit format feature. Format of UI/grid edit pages is done on several levels and with different base objects.

With a physical domain object you can configure a reusable object for size of the form field and the number of characters that can be entered in this field. A physical domain object controls the UI appearance of db-table column on the screen.

E.g. when you have a db-table column which is defined as varchar(500) you can configure via a physical domain, that you want to have a form filed with 20 (character-pixels) and allow the user to enter only 50 columns. When the number of maximum characters is reached the keyboard in this form field is locked.

Via grid edit formatting you can configure the look and feel for a single table. Grid edit formatting is done via server side configuration files for the values/settings to be displayed and database side configurations settings what should be applied to a single table.

Mind that there are a lot of approaches how to format a table via the server formatter table. It's not recommended to use this feature any longer because it's deprecated and will be removed in one of the future releases.