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”

There is an option to format displayable numeric values. It is possible to display numbers with style of decimal number, currency, unit and percentage with the following settings:

General settings

Those settings are applied in the case of each styles:

• NF_NAME - name / identifier of the number format
• NF_CULTURE - locale definition of the number formatting. Refers to a BCP 47 language tag. E.g.: de-DE, en-US, en-GB.
• NF_STYLE - style of the setting. Accepted values are: decimal, currency, percent, unit. Default is decimal
• NF_FRACTION_MIN - minimum displayed decimal digits. Default is 0.
• NF_FRACTION_MAX - maximum displayed decimal digits. Default and maximum value is 20. Take care! If value of NF_FRACTION_MAX is lower then the decimal digits of the displayed number system makes rounding which can affect entered or existing data!
• NF_GROUPING - use grouping separator (e.g. thousand separator) during display. Accepted values are: always, auto (uses locale preferences), min2 (if at least 2 digits in a group), true (same as always), false (no grouping). Default value is auto.

Currency specific settings

• NF_CURRENCY - currency code of the currency. ISO 4217 currency codes are displayed. Default is EUR.
• NF_CURRENCY_DISPLAY - display method of currency. Accepted values are: code, symbol, narrowSymbol, name. Default is symbol.
• NF_CURRENCY_SIGN - further formatting setting for standard or accounting format. Accepted values are standard, accounting. Default is standard.

Unit specific settings

• NF_UNIT - unit to use. E.g.: kilogram, celsius. Shorter list of values: https://tc39.es/ecma402/#table-sanctioned-single-unit-identifiers Longer list of values: https://github.com/unicode-org/cldr/blob/main/common/validity/unit.xml
• NF_UNIT_DISPLAY - display method of the defined unit. Accepted values are: short, narrow, long. Default is short.

Sample configuration Number formats can be defined in table etx_system_config_set. Sample INSERT INTO statements for a number definition can be seen below. It will display numbers as currency (EUR), and uses EUR-sign to display. It will display 3-20 decimal digits, comma as decimal separator and dot as thousand separator. Sample output: 1.023.456,780 €

insert into etx_system_config_set (cfgset_id, cfgset_variant, cfg_id, description, ind_active, cfg_value, cfg_id_overlay, cfg_id_link) values ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_NAME', 'Standard EUR', 1, 'EUR', null,null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_STYLE', 'Format Stype', 1, 'currency', null,null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_CURRENCY', 'EURO sign', 1, 'EUR', null,null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_CURRENCY_DISPLAY', 'EURO sign', 1, 'symbol', null, null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_CURRENCY_SIGN', 'EURO sign', 1, 'standard', null, null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_UNIT', 'unit to use', 1, 'null', null, null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_UNIT_DISPLAY', 'unit to use', 1, 'null', null, null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_FRACTION_MIN', '3 decimals', 1, 3, null, null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_FRACTION_MAX', '20 decimals', 1, 20, null, null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_GROUPING', 'use grouping separators', 1, 'true', null, null), ('NBRFORMAT', 'CUR_01', 'NF_CULTURE', 'German German', 1, 'de-DE', null,null);

System default In file system_defaults.php default number formatting can be set. It is used for each columns which does not have a number format setting. Only culture setting should be modified. Other settings are set by defaults (see previous sections). System default format sets a decimal number format with 0 to 20 decimal digits, without thousand separator and locale-specific decimal separator.

// ---
// number format default definition
// it is set by default for all columns which does not have
// a number format setting
define('NUMBER_FORMAT_DEFAULT', 		array("name" => 'default_nf', 
						      "description" => 'default format', 
						       "culture" => 'DE-de')
);

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.