regions - Regions

Regions are, usually, defined for collections in order to provide the collection(s) to be displayed in a list, tree or table. Regions might also be defined for combo boxes in order to define multiple collections in the drop list. Other control style types may refer to regions but those will be ignored.

When a field control associated with a control type supporting regions does not define any region, the collection defined in the data source is considered to be the only region to be displayed. When the region defined in the data source is marked as collection, it will be displayed as top region. Otherwise, local collections of the instance selected in the data source might be referenced as regions or regions referring to global resources or operation paths by be defined. In any case, regions have to be defined, when the data source is not defined as collection.

Regions are field resources an may refer to a field control in order to define sub regions or specific layout information as font or associated image (icon). Layout settings and images apply to the region header, but not to the row content. In order to set layout and image information for data cells in a row, those have to be attached in the ControlContext::doBeforeDataSet() handler.

In order to activate region labels, a label text has to be defined for the region text definition (or the related field control) and show_label has to be set to true. In this case, a static region will be created which displays the region label and may be expanded, as as it contains items.