Posted by: Stefan Cullmann
11/15/2008 

Form and List 05.00.00 is the official successor of UserDefinedTable3.5.1, created for you by the UserDefinedTable project team. Forms and Lists introduces new features, I already blogged about the form mode and the tracking/ notification features. Today I want to cover up a new column setting: Private Columns.

UserDefinedTable already offered to tweak the visibility of certain columns. If you disable "visible" for a column, the column will not show up in data grid for all users who don't have the required permission "show all columns". This setting doesn't affect the editor or form mode, the column remains editable.

The new "Private column" setting is the opposite, it controls whether that column is editable or not, and it is again controlled by a custom permission.

I will show up a simple use case, a small conference or seminar. It starts with a "call for papers". The submitted papers are checked afterwards by a program committee. All accepted lectures should show up as program.

Here is the configuration of the data:

It has columns for the author/ presenter, taking first name, last name and his email address. The lecture will be saved inside a title and a description column.
A column Decision holds the decision of the program committee. We declare that column as private

Afterwards we set up security: Everybody is allowed to create new records, which means everybody is allowed to submit papers. Members of the Program Committee are allowed to edit the entries including all private columns.

This setup will result into such a form. You might want to set the default value of last name, first name and email with system tokens like [user:lastname], [user:firstname] and [user:email], which would fill the form for all authenticated users.

You will notice that there is no input field for the decision column, it is hidden and will only be shown to users inside the role "Program Committee".
Even if it is hidden, the value of the field will be set to the default value.

I would setup also Tracking and Notification, sending an email to both program committee and sender. The auto setup would include the value for decision, so the sender will be informed that his submission was successful though its state is still undecided.

Now you set up a second page for your Program Committee and place a mirrored instance of the module inside. Now you would configure it in list mode instead of form mode. The members of the committee are able to edit each submission, and they will get a radio button list control for the decision field:
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You remember that tracking and notification is per page. I suggest now a different setup which fires on the "on Update" event. The mail can inform the presenter whether his paper was accepted or not.

The program is solved on a third page, also containing a mirror of the same module. It shows up the growing program, containing only the accepted papers. This is done by applying a filter to the list. In that case the filter expression is simply [Decision] ='Accepted'.

More new features used in that example:

New Data type Separator
The new data type Separator isn't really a data type as it doesn't handle any data. Inside the example, I used it to clean up separate the submission forms into different parts. A separator returns the column header followed by an <hr> tag. You can tweak the Separator using the CSS classes "Head Separator". The visibility flag has a different meaning here, if you disable it, only the <hr> tag is used.

Filtering and Searching
Old users of the UserDefinedTable will be interested to know, that there is no more a difference in Filtering or Searching for Data Grid mode and XSL based output. Filtering and search happens before the Xml is generated, making it much easier for a lot of use cases. The limitation for XSL search of only case-sensitive is gone out of the same reason.

Filtering also supports Token Replace. Form and List uses the core token replace engine and extends it by introducing new tokens. You can query server variables, form values and querystring parameters using [Server:NameOfVariable], [Form: NameOfParameter] and [Querystring:NameOfParameter].

Form and List is still inside Release tracker, and it requires DotNetNuke 5. I encourage everybody to test the module as it is included in the public release candidate. This distribution is NOT RECOMMENDED FOR PRODUCTION USE at this time. I appreciate any feedback; please report any issues and suggestions to the UDT forum.

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