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The responsibility of the contactlist page that we designed in the
previous section was showing a list of the rows returned from execution of a
query. However view pages are also able to show the details of a single row. In
this case, instead of showing a table of rows, only the attributes of a single
row are displayed. The syntax used for describing this kind of view pages
is quite similar to the multi-row view pages, with the single difference that
instead of the <body> tag a <top> tag encompasses the data definition section of the page. As an example, we design the contactdetail
page. To allow for comparison, we omit the email address in this stage.
<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<page type="view">
<title>Contact Detail</title>
<icon>contactdetail.gif</icon>
<top>
<querysource>xmlquery/contact.xml</querysource>
<pageparam>id</pageparam>
<fields>
<field name="name" caption="First Name"/>
<field name="lastname" caption="Last Name"/>
<field name="phone" caption="Phone#"/>
<hr/>
<field name="address" caption="Address"/>
</fields>
</top>
</page>
It is seen that the XML definition is quite similar to the definition
of the contactlist page. Presence of the <top> tag denotes that this page is
displaying
a single row. Therefore, the source query of this page must also return a single row.
However the source query of the page is the same as the query used in the contactlist page. Actually, extracting the single required row is
accomplished by the <pageparam> tag.
The "Detail" link provided in the contactlist page passes the value of the id attribute for the selected contact to this page. On the
other hand, in this page the <pageparam> tag introduces the id attribute as the
page parameter. So when the page is executed, the row for which the id
attribute is equal to the received parameter will be selected as the source row.
In fact, the attribute defined in the <pageparam> tag and the value of the
parameter construct a conditional expression which is added to the where clause
of the query, before it is submitted to the database. The output of this
page is shown in the following figure.
Contact detail
page in browser
It is seen that just changing the <body> tag with the <top> tag
has resulted in a complete reorder in the page layout. Instead of
displaying the value of the attributes in columns, the page lists every
attribute in a separate row and the captions are printed as titles before the values. In the next section, we will change the
contactdetail page so that it includes the email addresses associated with the
contact. This is accomplished by using the hybrid view pages. |
