40. Tabs

Tabs

One of the options provided by WOW is to display the results of an operation in a tabbed layout. This layout

is typically used where you have one primary operation, and multiple secondary operations related to the

primary operation. For example, your primary operation might be to look up a customer, and your secondary

operations might allow you to view that customer's history, current charges, and account options. While you

are running the secondary operations, you still want to be able to view the results of your primary operation

(e.g. the current customer resulting from your search).

Creating Tab Operations

This section will describe how to configure your operations to use a tabbed interface, as shown above.

The first step is to determine what your primary operation (also known as the "tab parent operation") will

be. In our example, this is the query which looks up a customer based on a name search. The operation

type of your tab parent operation should be set to "Tabbed Operation":

Once the tab parent has been defined, the next step is to create your secondary operations (also known as

the "tab data operations"). Creating a tab data operation should be done exactly like creating an associated

operation and associating it with the results of the tab parent operation. That process is summarized below:

• • Each tab data operation should be an association operation type (such as 1-to-Many Association or

    • 1-to-1 Association).

  • The tab data operations can use the double question mark notation to refer to fields in the result of

    • the tab parent operation.

Here is the tab data operation:

• • Each tab data operation should be listed as the associated operation on a field descriptor of a

    • result field of the tab parent operation.

There must be one such field (with an associated tab data operation) for every tab. The external name of

the field will be the name of the tab as it is displayed to the user. It does not matter whether the field is a

derived field or a physical field; what's important is that the field be selected as part of the tab parent

operation, and that the field is listed in the detail display columns (if the detail display columns are left blank

then all fields are displayed by default, so not specifying detail display columns will work as well).

So in summary, the operation type of the tab parent operation must be "Tabbed Operation," and the tab data

operations are each associated operations which are associated with a particular field of the tab parent.