I am a newbie so please forgive my ignorance.  I have a number of questions as I am trying to get my head around the concept of a child form dialog control.

1 - If I create a basic maintenance form for a specific business object that I plan to launch from a menu to add / edit / or delete records, can that same form also be used as the child form that will be called from a parent form via a child form dialog control on the parent form?

2 - Assuming that the answer to question 1 above is "Yes", if I want to call several different maintenance forms from a single parent form will I need to add multiple child form dialog controls to the parent form?

3 - Can a child form that was called via a child form dialog control on a parent form call a browse dialog?

Sam Tenney

Hi Sam,



The short answer to your questions is yes.



Now design logic should play a factor in how you create and present your forms to your users. The ChildformDialog is basically a control that will allow you to show a modal form ex: myform.ShowDialog() it does have the advantage of allow you to translate any business object in the parent form to the child form in their current state and record positions, but as modal form it is expected to return a dialog value "OK, Cancel, etc" and this value be evaluated either in the child or parent form to do whatever your logic is.



With the above in mind, then I believe it would be kind of difficult to create a Maintenance Form (with the toolbar) and also used it as a child form, even though with creativity it can be done, you could have several New() constructors to pass parameters and either hide/show the toolbar, etc.



Also you can create Browse Dialog classes and call them from anywhere not just the maintenance toolbar.



I suggest you download the StrataFlix sample application from your "My Account" zone and study it, since it does make uses of these techniques.

Edhy Rijo

Thanks Edhy for your reply.  But I want to be able to call several different child form dialogs from a single parent form.  This is different than calling a single child form dialog and allowing it to share multiple business objects with the parent form.  In order to be able to call multiple child form dialogs from a single parent form will I need to drop multiple child form dialog controls on the parent form?

Sam

You are welcome Sam, and yes, you can drop as many as you need and also based on the logic you decide to use, you can make backups of the BO data at any stage you want in case you want to synch all BO changes related to the parent and either save then all, or save them each one at a time. You have full control on what you may want to accomplish here.

Edhy Rijo