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 logical domain object you can configure a reusable object for the overall appearance of an db-table grid column on the screen. A logical domain object controls the usage of the widget that is used to display/enter that values for a column.

E.g. when you have a db-table column which is defined as varchar(500) you can configure via a logical domain, that you want to have a form with 2 (character-lines) and 50 character (pixels) allow the user to enter the values.

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.

With a semantic domain object you can configure a reusable object that tells end user which type of business content a db-table grid column contains. A logical domain object controls the texts and headlines and mouse over info of db-table column on the screen.

E.g. when you have a db-table column which is defined as varchar(500) and is named INV you can configure via a semantic domain, that this column contains always some “Invoice number of”. With additional information on the db-table column properties you can add some additional business information. The system concatenates this text to a combined column title and column heading.

“Invoice number of purchase order”

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.