Working with dialogs in NRapid

In this post I’ll cover the basic usage of dialogs in NRapid, how do they work and what kinds of controls do we have available.

As we already saw, to create a dialog we have to add a nested class named "Dialog" inside a report. In order to add controls, we need to define properties in that class, and based on the properties type, the report engine will create and add the controls to the dialog.

This mechanism is pretty much based on conventions, but we have some attributes to annotate the properties and modify the default behavior.

This post is on basic usage of dialogs, so combos and autocompletes are off the table, because they requires a bit more of configuration.

And then when we run the report we get this

As you can see in the output dialog, one of the engine conventions is “first defined, first served”, but sometimes this is not the desired behavior or you maybe want to add columns or change the text on the labels or stuff like that. To do that you can use annotations:

And when you run the report, you will see that the output has been modified:

This is just a sneak peek of how to work with dialogs, will be upcoming post covering combos, autocompletes, validations, calculated props., and many more. Stay tuned!

You can get the source code of NRapid from here

And the sample app from here

The Northwind database is available from download at http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=23654

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