How feasible is it to apply custom css properties to the fields as they are displayed in the table as well in the forms.

Question

I've been giving this a lot of thought over the few days since I first raised this. In essence, what I'd really like to be able to do is to highlight items that need some action.

So essentially setting the table/row/column attributes based on some criteria - either on a calculation or another value in that specfic row or another value in an associated view.

This would allow the view to do some sort of pre-processing. For example, every night I update our Membership database and set an 'Overdue' flag (Yes or No) on each Membership row based on various criteria associated with Membership Category, Membership Duration and Payment - all to just include an Overdue column in the table. I could define these for each Membership in a view and then use that view to highlight the ExpiryDate column in the table.

e.g. on the ExpiryDate column - WHERE %ExpiryDate% < %vwExpiryDate% THEN... set to bold red text on a yellow background.

This is, I think, a clumsy example. But as you're aware I do a lot of business rules processing using Triggers after updates, but this would allow a certain amount of business rules pre-processing. I'm sure that other clients would find much better ways of using a feature like this.

Comments

Hello Colin, thanks for the comment.  There is nothing clumsy about your example.  I merged it into your request.

Answer 1

This is a common scenario. There are several ways you can make these records more visible.

1. You specified that you had a boolean OverDue column. I would start by including that column in the table view as one of the first columns. That by itself should be quite clear. dbFront will show a very visible Green Check for True values and a very clear Red X for False on nullable columns. Whether the OverDue column is populated by a nightly procedure or calculated in an attached Table View, both options are valid.

2. Apply a custom table sort so that the OverDue records naturally appear at the top.

Additionally, the Advanced Search makes it trivial to filter by a specific boolean column, so your users can easily work through a backlog of overdue records.

We have added the ability to apply custom CSS to table rows and even columns based on record values. For more details see: Conditional Row Colors

An outstanding feature request is for the ability to define a custom Todo List that would collect all table records that require attention. If that would meet your needs then please vote on the feature: Custom Todo List

Comments

I've looked at the other two features that you suggested (Conditional row colours and Custom To Do lists and have added my votes for them.
That together with the suggestion you made in your response is enough for me to close down this request - once again thanks for your help.