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Monday, February 29, 2016

A simpler and more atomic control over associated collections using the AllowLink/AllowUnlink commands in the Model Editor

One of our recent team OKRs was and still is "improving developer experience when accomplishing common tasks", and in this blog post, I will cover yet another small, but important improvement in XAF v15.2.4+ that adds to this larger goal.

Let me quote Mark, the owner of the original suggestion in the Support Center, to quickly define the problem:

If you set AllowNew to false, both the link and new buttons are missing
If you set AllowDelete to false, both the delete and unlink buttons are missing.
There are scenarios where it would not be desirable to allow add new or add delete but to still have link and unlink (as those are very independent types of activities).
Proposed SolutionAllow for independent control of the link and unlink buttons.

As a side note, I wanted to note that we seem to have started exploring XAF with Mark almost at the same time in 2007. And from what I gather, he is still using our business application framework for his projects today in 2016, with 12 years of overall DevExpress experience in total! Who has more  "oscars"?;-)  - tell me your years with XAF/DevExpress in comments, please!

Back to the topic, previously there was a way to manage this using a custom ViewController (by managing the ActionBase.Active state), but this was not straightforward for most users. Since there were many other sensible scenarios from users where simplification for these popular commands would be required, we have implemented a simpler and more flexible solution at the Application Model level.

Now, in addition to the AllowNew, AllowEdit and AllowDelete quick options for the ListView node in the Model Editor, you can use the new 

Wednesday, February 24, 2016

Collapsible layout groups in the new XAF Web UI

Starting with v15.2, the new XAF web UI provides a built-in solution for this task. Please see a screenshot from our XCRM demo:



You can enable this feature for required layout groups in the Model Editor via the new IsCollapsibleCardGroup option at the Views | <DetailView> | Layout | level:

Tuesday, February 16, 2016

UPDATE for v15.2.6+ on "Simplifying the structure of the ChangeState Action"

This is just a follow-up on my previous StateMachine - Simplifying the structure of the ChangeState Action - YOUR FEEDBACK IS NEEDED post. We greatly appreciate the feedback you shared with us in this survey post as well as in the Support Center. We have implemented the most expected behavior by default in v16.1 and also made it possible to easily switch it in the current v15.2.6+.

More info is available in this link: https://www.devexpress.com/issue=S172871