A great advantage of the Web interface is
the possibility of displaying large amounts of information on screen. That's why
programmers find it so difficult to organize all this information without
creating a chaotic combination of illegible data.
Many times we are faced
with important data that we do not need available all the time, or that we would
rather hide from the screen after using it. With this objective in mind, we
introduce the possibility of collapsing a grid. This way, the information can be
displayed or collapsed by clicking on an icon (represented by the +
sign). The following sample application shows how the details of each car are not displayed
unless the user wants to see them:
This grid property
may be used for free-style grids as well as for simple grids. It is possible to
indicate whether a grid will be collapsed by default or not.
To show whether the grid is collapsible or
not, it is necessary to specify this in its properties:
AllowCollapsing shows that we are dealing with a collapsible grid,
and Collapsed tells us the grid's default status, whether it's collapsed or not,
by showing the data.
It is also possible to specify these
properties upon execution. For example,
Event Start
Customers.AllowCollapsing = 1
EndEvent // Start
This enables to show certain information to some Web
users -according to their profile-, and to present the same information to the
rest of the users without displaying it (collapsed).