Adding a CUI button, getting context item

RE: Adding a CUI button, getting context item

AngelaIp — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 12:56:27 GMT

If your are a subscriber, the CUI Admin Guide contains a few (~3?) tiny code samples that covers finding the context item.

And some of the technical foundations are described in the patent Aras uses for CUI:

https://uspto.report/patent/app/20200394055

(Some of the pictures show a few nice to know details, but in general the patent is no big help. )

RE: Adding a CUI button, getting context item

alaxala — Wed, 19 Oct 2022 06:39:39 GMT

I have long come to terms with the fact that there is no good documentation and never will be. The only support for the community is the debugger and sources.

I didn't know anything about "options" three days ago. All I did was add a CUI button, an "Item Click" method with one line:

debugger;

turned on developer tools in the browser and pressed the my button.

And voila, now I see the whole context of my "Item Click" method with its parameters, their properties, properties and methods of the "window", "document" etc. And now I know about "options".

Unfortunately this is the only way to do something beyond the documentation examples.

RE: Adding a CUI button, getting context item

Morgan — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 16:45:57 GMT

I'll keep this in mind. I got my solution working but I have a feeling these other projects will come in handy very soon 🙂

RE: Adding a CUI button, getting context item

AngelaIp — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 16:15:02 GMT

There are a couple of Aras community projects on github regarding CUI elements that are very helpful. Just search for "aras cui github".

They cover the most important stuff you need to know. But some of them may be outdated.

More fancy stuff like the "init Methods" you have to find out on your own.

Some general tip as soon as you want to build more intelligent buttons

1. Know the names most important CUI locations (depends on version cause Aras did some restructuring once, which was great fun)
2. Try to understand how Aras names the CUI Methods.
3. Try to understand the Promote/MassPromote button (it contains a lot of little UI highlights)

RE: Adding a CUI button, getting context item

Morgan — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 16:00:19 GMT

Thanks for this info, is there any documentation on CUI out there? The admin guide is pretty abysmal. I feel like I may run into more situations like this.

RE: Adding a CUI button, getting context item

AngelaIp — Tue, 18 Oct 2022 13:46:08 GMT

This discussion reminds me to this post where I tried to figure out to call a Method from everywhere: https://community.aras.com/f/development/3996/call-same-client-method-from-different-locations-action-cui-form-button

The post shows a combined CUI call mentioned that works for Grid and Form. But it´s maybe not the best variant anymore. Using "options" as outlined by Alaxala is probably the more modern approach.

"options" is a hidden variable used by the CUI element. As Alaxala says, it contains the itemId - or even multiple ones when we came from a grid and user selected 10 items at once. So it´s most of the time the most flexible variant if you reuse the Method at many locations.

If you just use the CUI element in a Form, you can get the full context similiar to document.thisItem like this:

const myItem = thisItem;

const myId = thisItem.getId();

RE: Adding a CUI button, getting context item

alaxala — Mon, 17 Oct 2022 07:36:48 GMT

"options" is declared as the parameter of your onClick method and has the "itemId" and "itemTypeName" properties. Or you can use window.item.