Open Skillbuilders modal page from report

Question

I want to open the Skillbuilders modal page from within a report. The first column in a report represents the primary key of the table the report shows. What is the best way to do that?
The idea is this: in the report region, there's a button CREATE that opens the modal dialog by Skillbuilders. A user can enter some data, clicks submit, modal dialog closes and report is refreshed. That's working now. Now I want to add a link to the first column in the report, that also opens the modal dialog, passing the value of the primary key of the row the user clicks on.
I'm not that experienced with Javascript, I guess I'll have to create an dynamic action with a jquery selector, and as a true action, a javascript call to open the dialog. Can someone give me a start?
Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

You actually do not need that much javascript in this case. Simply design your column as you would normally do to create a link column.
<ul>
<li>Column Link: Provide a link text</li>
<li>Link Attributes: onclick="return false;" class="show_modal"</li>
<li>Set the target page and provide any items you want filled.</li>
</ul>
onclick="return false;" is to prevent the default behaviour of the anchor tag: navigate to the location specified in the href attribute. We want to open the modal page instead.
Now to have the modal dialog open, create a dynamic action.
<ul>
<li>Event: Click</li>
<li>Selection Type: jQuery Selector</li>
<li>jQuery Selector: .show_modal</li>
<li>Advanced > Event Scope: live (so the links will work after pagination)</li>
</ul>
For the true action, select the SkillBuilders Modal Page plugin, and make sure these are specified as following. This will take the location in the generated link columns and open a modal page for this location.
So, this would open your edit page with the correct id (which you set up in the column link).
</ul>
<li>URL Location: Attribute of Triggering Element</li>
<li>Attribute Name: href</li>
</ul>
If you set it up like this, you have the convenience of the standard column link definitions, no need for any javascript save onclick=false and no need to fill up page items and deal with submission to session state.