How the User View Is Integrated with Forms

The user view is often used in conjunction with a form. Forms contain rules that control how data is presented through HTML fields and is processed after the HTML page rendering the form is submitted. A system component called the form generator combines a form definition and a view to produce HTML that a browser then displays.

View attribute values are displayed by assigning them to an HTML component in the form. (See Chapter 7, HTML Display Components for more information on how view attributes can be displayed.)

Views are implemented as instances of the GenericObject class. This class provides a mechanism for the representation of name/value pairs and utilities for traversing complex hierarchies of objects through path expressions. A path expression is a string that is interpreted at runtime to traverse an object hierarchy and retrieve or assign the value of an attribute.

You must understand how to write path expressions to assign valid form field names. For more information on using path expressions, refer to the section titled Path Expressions.