Friday, September 23, 2016

#527 PCS 16.3.5 New Features Part 1 --> Introduction to Web Forms

Your starting point should be the What's New doc for PCS 16.3.5.

Click here to read it.
One of the most interesting additions is the new web forms functionality.
Let's be honest, the previous Frevvo based forms were rather basic, they've even been renamed Basic Forms. So now you have the choice, you take either the basic forms - very effective for eGov style forms based apps - or else the new web forms with their richer UI. So let's take a look.

Web Forms

From the docs -
This release introduces a powerful and intuitive new forms editor for creating forms without rules scripting. The editor lets developers create multiple views (presentations) for a single form, reuse forms within forms, brand them by uploading a CSS stylesheet, create list of values (LOV) tables, and fetch data using REST connections.The new forms editor is called Web Forms, and the existing forms editor is now called Basic Forms.



Here is a simple example, leveraging the following business object -









As already mentioned, in 16.3.5 we have the choice
between New Web Form and New Basic Form.


















The basic form has 1 new addition for this release.
Note: the new button on the palette - Manage Header Sets -
These allow PCS basic forms to call external REST services, protected by custom headers.











Again, from the docs -

For basic forms that fetch data by calling external REST services that are protected by custom headers, Process Cloud Service provides custom header support using a superset of Basic Auth support. 
Custom headers use tokens for authentication instead of a user name and password and are not shared with Composer during REST calls. The header can be marked as secret or can be made visible to Composer users.
You can map multiple headers to the same REST API call. For example, two departments can create different headers and map them to the same REST API call.
Read the full details here

I add the business object to the form -


















and that's it! Our basic form.

So what does the new web forms component offer us?

I create a New Web Form.

















Note the Basic Palette of widgets available -





















Note the form properties.




Note that one can also set the display for the target device -


Let's look at the UI controls, available in the Basic Palette -




Here is the Advanced Palette -



Note the Business Types available - my OrderBO is pre-seeded.

I can drag and drop OrderBO onto the canvas,as per the basic form.

Let's edit the product field -



Note the available Events -


Here I add an event to set the  units to 1, on form load.





I click Preview -



Great stuff!






2 comments:

Ivan Dikanev said...

Are there any indications as to when this functionality appears in the on-premise release, if at all?

Niall Commiskey said...

Ivan, no