Like lookup forms, maintenance forms are divided into panels. But where lookup forms always have exactly two panels, maintenance forms can have any number of panels. By default, they have three when they are created:
- Toolbar.
- Main.
- Audit Information.
Depending on what data the form uses, it could also have one or more panels for information that comes from the form's child object(s) or parent object.
Although you can define your own layout, the following is most common:
- Toolbar: The Toolbar panel contains the buttons that affect the whole form, like Save and Correspondence. S3 creates a maintenance form with several standard buttons already in the panel. You could also add custom buttons. A Toolbar panel doesn't look like a regular system panel, with a title bar and a frame and other formatting. This panel automatically has its special formatting as part of the framework. In fact, users never call it a panel. To them, it's just a line of buttons.
- Parent: A record may have a parent panel above its form object information. This panel contains information about the parent record the record belongs to. For example, an address record may have a parent record for the person the address is for. Its parent panel contains that person's information: their name, DOB, SSN, etc. Usually, this panel contains links for navigating to that parent record.
- Main: The Main panel is automatically created by S3 as a blank panel for you to add controls to. Usually, this first available panel is used to add controls for the form's object data. You can divide such a panel into tabs to logically partition data from a single object. This is a very common design.
- Child: Child table values are expressed on a maintenance form as a collection, and therefore as a grid. Usually at least one panel houses these grids. Common design is to put all the child information in one panel and divide that panel into tabs, one per grid.
- Audit Information: The Audit Information panel is another panel with framework coding that doesn't look like a panel to the user. It's a bar at the bottom of the screen with "Create:", "Modify:", etc.
This post is part of the Maintenance Form topic. Click here to open the Maintenance Form Overview.