After much deliberation, I have decided to use dhtmlXGrid to develop a portal widget for Dataface. This will improve the usability of Dataface for complex data sources dramatically. Among other reasons, I have chosen dhtmlXGrid because:
<ol> <li>It is available under GPL.</li> <li>It seems really cool!! and polished.</li> </ol> <p>My initial observations are:</p> <ol> <li>Documentation and examples seem to be quite good and mature.</li> <li>There doesn't seem to be a forum or mailing list available.</li> <li>I am only using the Standard edition. The enterprise edition is not open source. </li> </ol> <p>One of the things that I like about this component is that you can load it with XML. This should make it relatively easy to define dataface actions that just output XML that is compatiblle with a the grid. I am stuck in a couple of spots, however.</p> <ol> <li>I can't see how to define como-boxes and select lists using XML. There are examples using javascript to programatically define them (which is okay), but I would rather do everything from XML.</li> <li>.. okay only one thing right now... </li> </ol> <p>I will scour the source code a little bit more and will probably end up emailing the company who makes it to ask about this one.. as it is pretty important.</p><p>The lack of a forum or community provisions seems a little limiting. I feel inclined to set up my own "fan" community site for this, if I begin using it a lot.</p><p> More on this later when I have some results.<br /></p>
Okay.. I found out how to define combo-boxes and select lists using XML. I just wasn’t looking at the examples closely enough.. For the benefit of future readers, the syntax goes something like:
Sales
Shipping
1 Day
1 Week
...
...
This would create a couple of columns, the second of which is a combo box with options Day, and Week.
The xml seems to have been stripped out in the previous comment… look at the page source to see the proper xml.