Example Column View

Developing a Column View

Developing a Column View is straightforward. The basic concept is that each column contains a Filter that defines which records appear in the column (in addition to any master filter set for the record selection screen as a whole). You also specify a title and a colour for each column heading.

Column Views are a powerful mechanism for presenting a business process in convenient visual form. You should expect to consider having a Column View definition for each individual business process, perhaps designed with different columns for different Groups of users depending on their role. Careful design of the filters for each column, together with definition of appropriate Steps, should enable you to build a process view with steps that neatly move a record across the columns as it progresses through the business process.

The Column View itself is a View record, with ViewType of Column. The View record requires a unique Name, the RecordTypeName of the record type for which it is to be displayed, an optional Description and IconName (which determines the icon shown to select the view and as its header), an optional ShowCalc being a calculation which determines if the view is to be offered to the current user.

If you are designing a ColumnView related to a Category, then the simple approach is to specify the Category in the View record itself - simply set the CategoryField value to the name of the field on the RecordType being displayed. This will automatically generate a ColumnView with one column for each value of the category, and allow for drag-drop between columns with Steps automatically triggered if there are required values between the category values.

Alternatively, you can specify the exact configuration of each column using a Script. In this case, the ColumnView will be built based on the content of the columns variable from the script evaluation. This array variable should contain an individual array for each column, which may contain any/all of title (the column heading text), colour (optional column header colour) and filter (specifies which records of RecordTypeName to display in this column).

Example Blueprint

Note that all script variables are evaluated as calculations, so as you will usually be specifying exact text, it is essential to enclose the values in quotation marks as shown in the example above.

Record Template Examples

As mentioned above, the standard view of records in a Column View is a simple List View, always showing available Step icons.

Accessing a Column View

A Column View can always be accessed from the Record Selection screen for its Record Type.

You can also create a link directly to a Column View by linking to its View record and referring to it by name. For example, if you have named your View record My Sales Process, you can create a link to it in any template (e.g. on a Page, in a template field etc.) using the displayRecordLink function as follows: