Creator IDE Issues

Question

I am trying to create a web site with about 5 pages, but then decided to do it as one page and use a tabset instead.
I cut and pasted controls from each of my existing pages to each page of the Tabset. I set up virtual forms, one per tab page.
Page 1, The welcome screen works fine.
Page 2, Login, also works.
Page 3, the search screen, has a Text field for search criteria, a search_button and a table to display the results.
Here are my issues:
1) On the search screen, no matter where I access it (search button action (not immediate), prerender), I am not able to get the value the user enters in this box. The login user id and password are accessed the same way, on another tab and it works fine. Any Ideas? Also the text field is marked as required, but it seems to submit anyway, even if it is blank. The text field participates in the virtual form, and the button submits the form. No other controls use the virtual form.
2) In my Projects window, my session bean has disappeared! I renamed it and that may of caused it. How do I get it to reappear? It exists under the source packages node and in the Outline pane.
3) I have copied this project to another box and it has a different data source. At first my entire tab control would not paint. This is a nescience. Why prevent the page from rendering simply because a datasource can't be found? Now, once I changed the Datasource used by my query (yes there is only one query and one table control so far), you would think that It would then render fine, but no. Then after poking around a while, the tab control suddenly appeared on my page. So now I try run and of course I get a message about the old data source being required. NEVER MIND - a re-start of creator cleared this one up.

Answer 1

To help others here is what I have discovered:
1) The problem was that for some reason the button was not submitting the form. I put a new button on the page and it worked fine. I was unable to discover any differences between buttons properties, has anybody had this issue?
2) My session bean is still missing from the projects window, I wonder if it is related to some of the problems I am having (described below). I moved the project to another PC and same result. Other projects show the SessionBean node right above the RequestBean node in the tree view, but not this one.
Some New issues:
4) Whenever I Restart IDE, it gives me errors about fields not being found on certain tabs (the ones bound to data) and those tabs will cause the entire graphical layout not to display in the IDE. I have one local (to the page) data provider and it has its CachedResultSet set to a RowSet on my sessionBean. The other 5 data providers are located on the sessionBean and their CachedResultSet property is not set. After choosing the appropriate RowSet for the CachedResultSet property on all 5 data providers then I can navigate to any tab and the Design Tab works great. All row sets are on my sessionBean.
5) Virtual forms not working.
     a) Logon Tab Page - UserID & Password are required. Both fields participate in a virtual form. The Login button submits the form. But when I click on another tab, it displays validation messages and does not allow the tab to change.
     b) Search Tab Page - Search Criteria text filed is required and participates in another virtual form. The Search button submits that virtual form. When I click on another tab, it displays validation messages and does not allow the tab to change. I also have a "New User" button (not associated with any virtual form) that exhibits the same problem. I made it submitter for its own virtual form and it still tries to validate.
     c) I made every tab page a submitter on a new virtual form and even added a hidden field that participates in it, but it still validates required fields before changing tabs. Any Ideas. I tried setting the tabs to "Immediate", but that causes other problems.
6) On my Customer tab, I have about 10 text field controls that are bound to columns on a data source. They are the only participants in a virtual form and a save button is the only submitter. All fields display data retrieved from the database, but only the first 3 fields (and the change_by and change_date set programmatically from the saveButton_action) update to the database. All other fields revert to their previous values (or blank for new customers) when retrieved again from the database. I also checked the database manually right after a save and the values are not being saved.
I changed the layout of the bottom portion of the fields and some fields were no longer associated with my virtual form, so I had to select them and make them participate in the virtual form again. I believe that all text fields were working before this, but can not conform, because I re dropped the database to implement some structure changes and was really not paying close attention to it.
Any help apprechiated.