069 Join Fields in the admin list view with field relations

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Amigo edited this page Oct 2, 2019 · 14 revisions

JOIN FIELDS IN THE ADMIN LIST VIEW WITH FIELD RELATIONS

Feature Effects How JCB Builds

Well I'm happy to announce that we have added a very long awaited feature to JCB. You will need to upgrade to version 2.8 to have this feature. This feature though does effect how JCB builds the Admin View, List View. That means these areas where you got list of items. 00:00:33 If you have custom scripting in your component in these areas, when you install or upgrade to version 2, you would experience that your custom scripting doesn't get added correctly. We'll still add it, it will still be added to the document. But you have to go and move it into the correct place and comment it. Do the 00:01:01 replacement of the code, add those diamonds to notify JCB to update the placement. Just a heads up, because the list views are improved the way it's being built. This extra changes to the code, snippets changes, the fingerprints and all that.

What The Feature Is All About?

What the new features is all about, is taking specific values like maybe this value(Look) and that value(Looks) and to combine them into one value into one column. And yet have the option of still being able to filter with those values. We have this component Sermon Distributor and I am planning to take the Preachers List View, 00:01:59 you'll see that it shows the name and a short description or whatever description you've added. I want to have it also show, if there is an email address. If this email address is filled in, then it should show the email address. Or if it doesn't find an email address but it finds a Web address it should show the web address. It should show either the one or the other. It must connected next to the name. I think we'll use that as our demonstration of this feature.

Demonstration - New Feature - Field Relations

Let's go back to Component Builder and then we would go to the Admin Views. If you haven't done it yet, there won't be an icon showing up anywhere, but once you've done it, there will be one. I'll show you that We will go to the Preachers Admin View. Go to the one you want to change. 00:03:01 Under the fields area you'll see that there is a new area called Admin fields relations. At the bottom you'll see a Field Relations. That's the new feature. You could either click 'Create admin fields relations for this admin view' 00:03:27 or you can click 'Create', both of them will achieve the same. Taking you to the same place. I'm going to click on 'Create admin fields relations for this admin view'. Then you are in the New Admin Fields Relations Builder.

Area Column - Three Places - Model(before modelling), Model(after modelling), View

You could click on adding a admin fields. We are going to set we are going to use the name and we are going to join that up with the email and with the web URL. We will see that there is this 'Area' column. The Area column can target three places, before modelling the value, after modelling the value, and the view. 00:04:12 If you know what a model is, that means the area where you still working with the code. Whereas in the view you must think of you already have a HTML trunk that represents that field.

Looking In The Code(see video)

If I could show you that more directly in the code. First looking at the folder structure, you will see I am in administrator, components, sermon distributor, here's the views and the models. Go to the model of the preachers the plural one, because we are going to the list view. You'll see it has items. At the moment there is nothing being modeled. Modeled usually would imply 00:05:01 if it is a json object, and it needs to be taken from json to an array. Or if it's a encrypted value and needs to be encrypted. Those kind of things. Whether you want to work with the value before that happens or after that has happened. If you want to work with the actual item where it's still an integer or a string. Then you'd target the model. If you want to target the view, 00:05:37 which in this case if we go to preachers and the body, you will see that everything from here up to here, is representing the ID. Everything from here up to here 00:05:58 is a presenting the name(see video). If you want to target this portion, it still gets generated, then you would target the view. Because then JCB will still build this whole block for you. Basically this block and you can move this block around and join it with the other block for the other field as you like. That could be that you can have two links. 00:06:27 Yes, all kinds of interesting things can happen. My best advice is to try it out, take it for a spin. Make some changes, compile it, install it. See what has changed, go to the areas which being either the view or the model. See the code that was generated based on your selection.

Some Changes Targeting Model Area - Joint Type - Concatenation With Glue Option

We are going to make multiple changes and show you what will happen. Save you some time, and understand what's happening. The first area I'm going to target is the model area. Then it has a Joint Type which is either a concatenation with a glue option. The glue option is: what do you want to be placed between the values? You could say no I want them to be completely crank up against each other like that (Glue/Code). It'll still add a little space in. 00:07:30 You can say no I want a little Arrow-> between them. It's a value you want to place between these two values. I'm going to leave it as a comma for now. Save and close. Save and close the view. You'll see there is a new icon, we can click and directly go edit the relation. 00:08:01 A new icon is added. If we go to the compiler, we will be able to compile this and see it in action. Go compile sermon distributor, install it. First thing is, let's open Sermon Distributor and let's go to the Preachers table and see how it looks in the interface. We see 00:08:30 it is adding both of them, adding the email, as well as the URL. Because it's exceeding a specific length, it is escaping it and we have this little Pop-up come up. There's that comma we added as a concatenation between the values. That is what we expected.

More Changes - Instead Of Using Default Glue Option Do Code Option

Let's go back and make some changes. Well let me let me first show you the code that was built. We were targeting the model, it add this as a glue to glue these values together. Concatenating them. Yes that was the model. This specific view doesn't have any modeling it does to the values. Even if I would to say it select after, it won't necessarily change anything. 00:09:32 Let's make another change. Instead of using the default glue option, we want to do a code option. You'll see the JCB cranks out to give you the freedom to write code. We are using the IDs of the fields 00:09:58 in curly braces() because many reasons, I'm not going to waste your time, more or less boils down to the fact that it's difficult to know exactly what the field names are going to be at this point for every kind of type of field that is there. Working with the ID saves us a lot of effort. 00:10:22 But since it's difficult to know which field is which ID, we had this little comment to give you a heads up. This value(280) is the website, this one (1222) is the email(see video). I would suggest if you are sure of what is what to take the comment out, because otherwise it'll be added to the code. On this stage we know that what this is saying, it is what we saw in the code. It is almost exactly the same, except that it is using numbers. We can do some little PHP. 00:11:00 We can say something like this: $preachersDetails. We are checking if this is not empty. Then we use that, which is the email. Otherwise we fall back onto the URL. When the URL is empty it means that there will be an empty string. Maybe that's not that ideal either. Let's make it a little bit more advance. It's saying if there is an email, use the email otherwise check if there is a URL. 00:11:32 No, if there is, sure then add it, if not then add nothing. It stays without the comma and everything. There we have a little adaptation there. So just make sure that this Convention is kept, ($item->(1222) the curly braces with the ID and then the closing curly brace. This will then be updated with the actual name of the field and so you can do full PHP coding in this area and 00:12:02 it will be implemented. You could also pass the value to a function which then passes it back to the value. This is in the model. This is before modelling and after modelling. That's a good thing that happened. Every time you change anything it's going to update the code. Sometimes it is expected that these two values might look different at this stage it doesn't. It is a JavaScript that fires on 00:12:37 changing of any of these fields. I have to type all that over. The best idea if you want to make changes, first copy the value then you can make changes. See what happens. Then as you decided what you want to do, you can paste it back in. 00:13:04 There we have it. If it doesn't behave right just change it a few times. We will still tweak the JavaScript to make sure that it's working exactly 100 %. So this is sort of beta phase but it works it functions as it should. I'm still ironing out some JavaScript.

Only Target The Name List Field Once

Another thing. You can only target the name list field once. You cannot add it a second time like this(see video) and say here we are going to do it again. Using maybe some other values to also target it in some way. 00:13:52 You cannot do that. Only one of them will get implemented. The other one will be dropped. It's a limitation I know. Believe me this feature as it is now is already stunning and able to achieve quite impressive results. Here we have it, we've adapted it. It will only show an email or a web address if there is one set. If there is none set, it won't show any. That's the expected result. Let's save this and see it in action. 00:14:31 We will compile it and install. There we have it. The preacher showing up with an email address.

Create Preacher Without Email Address

Let's create one without an email address. We created one with no email address. If you will see there's none. Let's add a web address. Let's close again. There is nothing not even a comma, but as you will see this is a link. The whole thing is a link. That might not be exactly what you want. Let's add a web address. Save and close. Because your web address was a little bit too long, it created a pop-up. 00:15:26 All that can be changed. Let me do something else. Let's use a shorter address. Save and close. That looks more acceptable. It detects whether there's an email or a web address. If there's none it shows none. That was with this new combine feature.

Targeting The View

Let's do something even more interesting. Again we go and open Preacher area clicking the icon underneath Preacher. This is a shortcut. Instead of targeting the model, we are going to target the View. This is where it really gets interesting. Because this little place holder called field=199 is a chunk of code as I explained initially in the beginning. Where we are saying 00:16:30 instead of targeting the actual value database value, you are targeting the produced code which JCB builds. The HTML block for that specific field. I would also encourage you removing the comment, this comment '<!-[199]=> Name;[1222]=>Email(not required);[280]=>Website ->' that shows you the name, the email and the web address. 00:16:57 I would also encourage you to once you have seen it just remove it. We might at a later stage take the comment and added underneath the box that it is clearly nowhere in the way. It is for you to know that this portion is for the email and the website address. Again I want to add a little bit dynamic Script. I need to keep in mind that I'm in HTML. 00:17:31 If I wanted to add PHP I will need to do the correct PHP tags and all the rest of it. That means you can target the item value. You can remove this '[field=199]
[field=1222]
[field=280]' and work with the item value. But this [field=199] little placeholder will produce the whole 00:18:03 block of code. If it's going to be a dynamic link, or something like that. It'll produce all of that for you if it's a custom field which links to another View. Then all of that can still be produced in this dynamic placeholder [field=1222] . But you can remove all of this and you can have it echo out anything which you just have to code.

Demonstration

I think best to demonstrate is, first used the Concatenation option which we can put a
between the values. Save and close. Compile, install. We will refresh this area. We will see that 'Leonard Ravenhill' value is a link, but the other two is text. That's exactly what we wanted to achieve.

Going To The Code(see video)

Going into the code, we open the body. You'll see the JCB added the
. There is a
, there's a
. There's the portion 'escape($item->email); ?>' of code that JCB build. It really build all of this. It's still built a link to the preacher. It's still built this as well. If this 'escape($item->email); ?>' was going to be a link to another view, it will produce that code. Checking the permissions and everything. Which is really what makes 00:19:43 This areas implementation quite exciting. Because it still takes care of the hard work of producing the code needed to display the value. If you pick up any behaviors in this new feature that is unexpected, please give us a heads up on Github and open an issue. We will try and address it as quick as we can. This is the new feature of combining admin view values 00:20:19 in a very easy way. It could have been done previously with some custom scripting, but this helps you and I'm sure makes it easy for you to just select the field you want to target. You first need to add the fields that you are already going to show in the list view and then select the field you want to join to it. I expected that you will understand that, but I realize I must mention that separate.

Preacher Field - Two Field - Name And Description

If we go into the Preacher fields area, you'll see we have two fields the Name(text), shown in list, and the Description shown in list. We don't make any changes. We don't say that the email and then website must also show in the list view. Only the fields that are not showing in the list view, show in the relationship view as Joint options. That's a heads up. What is exciting though, you can do a filter or a search on these fields that are not going to be placed but you know you are later going to select them as relationships. 00:21:47 JCB will end up creating the filter and make it searchable. Even if it's a link to another page you can click this to be a link and it will generate the link. I think it is amazing knowing that it's going to set all the permissions in place and everything else. Maybe I should demonstrate that quickly.

Demonstration - Combining Preacher With Name Row

In the Sermons area we will see that we have a Preacher table and a Name table. We have these two links 'Ten shekels and a shirt and Paris Reidhead', this 'Paris Reidhead' will open the Preacher, the same as opening it from the Preacher list view and then this 'Ten shekels and a shirt' is going to open the Sermon. This is going to be easy because 00:22:45 we can decide we have so many rows, let's combine the Preacher with the Name row. Yet we want to retain the link as it is working. We want to retain the option to filter by the Preacher. Let's show you how easy it is to do that. We'll go to the Sermons list View or admin view and then again to the fields, click on create fields relations, before we are going to do that, 00:23:20 I first need to remove the Preacher from the list. We are first going to go to where we selected the fields. That needs to be linked to the admin list view.

????

And the one we want to remove Is the preacher value So it's this one 00:23:42 Sermon preacher we gonna say no Don't add it and when you do that is gonna wipe out all the links that usually Should not be selected if it's not a listview But since we still wanted to be a link And we still wanted to be a filter We gonna leave those checked And then click save and close So now Getting back to this page And going to Fields we'll see that 00:24:10 The the preacher now Is No longer going to show the list View But it's still Going to be A filter in a link And if you compile now it won't show up at all You still need to now go and select the relations area click on new And then select name 00:24:33 Here You would now Need to select The sermon preacher And then View And then Well we could either say We wanna do this ourselves Or 00:24:50 We could Use glue Which in this case I'm just gonna use a space just an empty space like that And save and close And then we compile Install And then refresh the sermon page we see that now They are 00:25:21 Two links here The one is to open the Actual Sermon and the other one is opening the It's going to open the preacher So if we click on it it still behaves as before the preacher gets opened we closed again And we back here and we still have the preacher filter Here at the bottom of our page As we had it before 00:25:48 And so This is really Great We can also then open here And All is working as expected Now as easy as it was To combine these two values into one column While still retaining the actual links and everything surrounding this value having a Dynamically get the name 00:26:16 Because obviously in the table it's taught the ID only And now showing it here it means it's actually remapped it in the database so let me show you that So we open the sermons Model and we scroll down We'll see here in the the list query It's still Maps the preacher table in And Builds the connection on the ID in the preacher And still selects 00:26:49 The preacher name Then going to the view of that Sermons We see if you scroll down Here It has Produced this chunk Of code For the for the preachers name And this chunk of code 00:27:14 For the Sermon name So it still does all the Producing of the HTML code and all the permissional checking whether Does this user actually have The edit permission to To change this value Of the specific preacher 00:27:37 So yes and yet it's showing the preacher name As the linking up in the database was done So it's quite exciting I really Hope that you would find it as useful as I am already doing And like I said if you discover anything not to work as expected Please do contact me and on GitHub open up a issue And we will Take it from there. Thanks for watching.