Maximo custom control (Part III) – Conditional UI with custom properties

In the last exercise, we added new properties to a control, and by doing so, we have better understanding that the properties of a control is defined inside the <property-list>…</property-list> XML element. We also know how properties are passed from control level to its components.

If you have some experience with Application Designer, you must already know that, we can dynamically modify value of a property using Conditional UI. We can do the same with the custom properties that we recently added.

With the two properties: “part1size”  and “part2size” added to the multipart textbox in the previous exercise, let’s configure a simple Conditional UI to demonstrate this capabily:

• Create a new condition using Condional Expression Manager with following condition: length( :location ) > 10

• Use Application Designer to edit the “Location” application
• Select the "Location" multipart textbox under "Main" tab. Right click on it to open the Properties dialog of the control
• Go to “Advanced” tab, then add “READ” to the Signature Option box.
• Click on “Configure Conditional Properties” button to open the Conditional UI configuration dialog.
• In the “Configure Conditional Properties”, add “Everyone” security group, then specify the Condition we’ve just created in Conditioal Express Manager. Under Property Values – Condition is true, enter two properties:
• Property: part1size – Value: 15
• Property: part2size – Value: 35

• By doing this, we tell Maximo to resize the two components of the Multipart Textbox when the “location” field has a length of more than 10 characters.
• Save the application configuration. Then open Location application, find a Location with “Location” field is shorter than 10 characters, open it, you will see the multipart textbox looks normal. But if we open a location with the “Location” field longer than 10 characters, we will see that the multipart textbox is resized to be a bit longer.

The whole purpose of this exercise is to demonstrate that we can dynamically modify the appearance of Maximo application by adding new properties to a control, then modify the value of the properties based on specific conditions.

In the next post, I’ll provide a more detailed example on how to pass property values from component to JSP file, and then apply some business rules to Maximo UI controls using JSP and Javascript.