How to move to a particular record after getting the key from pop list?

Question

Hi,
I have a non-tabular form. I have provided a POP Lov to display and return the primary key of the table.
When a particular record is selected from the List I want the page to fetch that particular row from the table and populate the fields. This is a critical feature I need in most forms, so use can easily fetch any record of choice.
Can some one help me?
thanks
Seb

Answer 1

Hi
There are several methods you could adopt for this.
The most typical method would be the report/form combination of pages - where the form is populated based on the PK ID passed by a link from the form. In a lot of cases, I would suggest, this is what users would expect.
However, I can also see situations where the user wouldn't want to see a report just to get to a form. In these cases, either a Select List with Submit or a Popup LOV would be required.
Either way, the principles would be the same - you need to populate the form page's hidden PK item with the ID of the record you want to display/edit and let the page's "Fetch Row..." process retrieve the record when the page is reloaded.
For a Select List with Submit, the list itself could be the PK item or you could transfer this into the normal hidden item. The latter could be handled either by a process or a branch when the page is submitted (which would be triggered by the change in the list's value).
The popup LOV method would be more complicated as you have two pages to work with. However, this can still be done as long as you consider two things - (1) the popup page needs to set the ID value for the form page to use and (2) the popup page needs to force the form page to reload so that it can use this value. (1) can be done using a normal page submit - you can set any value on any page and it will be retained unless you clear the session value(s) for that page or item and (2) can be handled with javascript - a child window (which is what a popup is) can run javascript in its parent window - or by the user clicking a button on the form page.
Another alternative would be to retrieve all relevant values in the Popup and populate the parent with all these values when the user makes their selection. This would require that the hidden PK ID item on the form is "Hidden" rather than "Hidden and protected" to allow javascript to set this value so that the record can be saved correctly.
Andy