Identifying the Field for Reference

Naming a field provides you a way to reference the field value in other fields. Use the <ref></ref> tag set to reference a field value from another field. The following example concatenates into the fullname field the firstname and lastname field values with a string, a comma, and a space such as: lastname, firstname. The <s> tag designates a string.

Example 2–5 Referencing Fields

<Field name=’global.firstname’>
   <Display class=’Text’/>
</Field>
<Field name=’global.lastname’>
   <Display class=’Text’/>
</Field>
<Field name=’global.fullname’>
   <Expansion>
      <concat>
         <ref>global.lastname</ref><s>, </s>
         <ref>global.firstname</ref>
      </concat>
   </Expansion>
</Field>

Not all Field names represent path expressions for the view. Some fields are defined to represent containers of other fields and do not correspond to any one attribute of the view. In these cases, the Field name is used to identify the field so that it can be referenced by a FieldRef element. If the field does not need to be referenced, you do not need to specify the name.

For example, a form button performs an action, but does not contain a value or need to be referenced by another form. Therefore, it does not need a field name:

<Field>
   <Display class=’Button’>
      <Property name=’label’ value=’Recalculate’/>
      <Property name=’command’ value=’Recalculate’/>
   </Display>
</Field>

For more information on user views, see the section titled User View and Forms.