Understanding Grids and Scroll Areas
Scroll areas and grids serve as containers or organizers for multi-field data entry. You can think of all of the fields in each of these controls as belonging to one table in your database. In scroll areas, the fields appear on the page in a free form manner. In grids, fields appear as columns similar to those on a spreadsheet. Most scroll areas appear with even and odd rows in different colors. This enables you to visually distinguish rows at a glance. Additionally, when you select a row with the mouse, the row changes color to distinguish a selected row from other rows.
Three types of grid layouts appear in PeopleSoft applications:
Original grids.
Scrollable grids.
Analytic grids.
Original Grids
Original grids are the standard grid layout in releases prior to PeopleTools 8.50. With original grids, you can see navigation headers and footers; insert, multi-row insert, and delete buttons; and grid separator tabs. If the Personalize link is enabled by the developer, you can search for data within the grid, sort grid data; and rearrange, freeze, and hide columns to personalize your grids.
Scrollable Grids
Unlike original grids, scrollable grids take advantage of AJAX technology, which enables you to change the grid structure and content directly on the grid. You can make changes to scrollable grids directly from the transaction page without using the Personalize link. Additionally, scrollable grids can be configured to scroll data within the grid control so as to keep frozen columns or column headers from scrolling out of view and scrollable grids enable you to navigate from cell to cell vertically and horizontally.
Analytic Grids
Analytic grids look and function differently than original and scrollable grids. Analytic grids specifically retrieve data from the analytic server and display it in a grid format on a PeopleSoft Pure Internet Architecture page. The analytic grid is the centerpiece for the Analytic Calculation Engine user interface, enabling end users to view, edit, and drag and drop data from an analytic model cube collection.