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General properties and HTML attributes of Coach Views

Every Coach View has a set of standard properties. These properties are on two pages: General and HTML Attributes.

When you select a Coach View in a layout, the Properties area displays the General, HTML Attributes, and Configuration pages. These pages contain the properties of that Coach View instance. The General and HTML Attributes pages display properties that all Coach View instances have. The Configuration, has properties that are defined in the Coach View definition and they are specific to Coach Views that are bound to that definition. Stock controls provide examples of configuration properties.


General properties

The general properties consist of the following fields:

General property Description
Label Sets the display name of the Coach View. The default is the name of the Coach View.
Help Provides an area in which you can provide hover help for the Coach View instance.
Control Id Provides an identifier that you can use in JavaScript to access this particular Coach View instance. This identifier is also known as the view ID.
Binding Sets the business object or data type associated with this Coach View instance.
View Sets the Coach View definition that is used by the Coach View instance. Changing this property means that you are changing the type of the Coach View and configuration properties that you previously set no longer apply.
Visibility Sets the visibility of the Coach View. The default value is DEFAULT, which means that the Coach View uses the visibility of the Coach or Coach View that contains this Coach View.

  • When you set it to REQUIRED, the Coach View has a decorator that indicates to users that they must provide or set a value.

    Important: Setting the visibility to REQUIRED does not validate whether a user enters or sets a value. You must provide code that does this checking by, for example, implementing a validation service or script for the Coach that contains the Coach View.

  • When you set the visibility to EDITABLE, users can add or edit values in the Coach View.

  • When you set the visibility to READONLY, users cannot add or edit values in the Coach View.

  • When you set the visibility to NONE, users cannot see the Coach View.

You can use a variable to, for example, dynamically change the visibility according to various conditions. If use a variable to set the visibility, the variable must be a string with one of the visibility values.

Label Visibility Sets whether users can see the label at run time.

For example, you might want to have a Text Area stock control display a large description with no accompanying label. The values are SHOW (default) and HIDE.

Base Text Direction Sets the direction of the text that is displayed by the Coach View such as label text, text values, and other text that the user sees.

This property is available only if you enable the Base Text Direction preference. For information, see Adding bidirectional language support.

The default value is Default, which means the Coach View uses the text direction that is set in the user's profile. When you set the text direction to Left to Right or Right to Left, this action locks the text to the specified direction. When you set the text direction to Contextual, the first strong directional character in a string determines its text direction. This applies to all text elements that a Coach View displays.

For example, a Text stock control has an Arabic label but its field contents are English. In this case, the text in the label is right to left while the text in the field is left to right.

If you assign a variable for the Label, Help, Visibility, and Label Visibility general properties, there is a special category of variables in the configuration options called general options. These variables contain the metadata for the Coach View and correspond to the Label, Help, Visibility, and Label Visibility general properties. Unlike the other configuration options, you cannot edit their values in the Variables page.

The Tabs and Table stock controls use the Visibility and Label Visibility properties of the Coach Views that they contain to handle hiding labels and to support click-to-edit.


HTML attributes

To override existing values, use HTML attributes and classes.

For example, a .css file contains the following code:

.widerTextBox .dijitTextBox {
	width: 365px;}
This .css file defines a class called widerTextBox. This class has a width attribute that overrides the default width for dijitTextBox. To apply the widerTextBox class to a Coach View, add the class to the HTML Attributes of the Coach View.

Important: Do not use the following names as CSS class names in your HTML source code because they are reserved names:

Developing reusable Coach Views


Related concepts:
Configuration options and properties