What seems to be the most popular reason why a business rule would not be working?
There is very little that can really break in the business rules, except for one thing: we can include certain fields into the business rule conditions, and, then, forget to add those fields to the context (which can be a form, or it can also be an editable grid).
When working with the forms, we can always make a field hidden, so it won’t be visible, but it will still allow the business rule to work.
When it comes to the editable grids, though, it seems to be just plain dangerous to use the business rules.
Because:
- Editable grids are using views
- Those views can be updated any time
- Whoever is updating the views will, sooner or later, forget (or simply won’t know) to add a column for one of the fields required by the business rules
And voila, the business rule will not be working anymore. What’s worse, this kind of bug is not that easy to notice. There will be no errors, no notifications, no any signs of a problem at all. Instead, you’ll suddenly realize something is off (and you might not even know why it’s off by that time)… or, maybe, it’s the users who will notice long after the changes are in production…
This just happened to me again today – there is an editable subgrid for an entity, and that subgrid shows up on two different forms (even more, those forms are for different entities). There is an attribute that must be editable when on one of the forms, but it should be readonly when on the other form. The condition in my business rule would have to look at whether there is data in a certain lookup field, and that would only work if I had that lookup field added to the subgrid. Which means the interface would become more crowded, so the users would immediately want to get rid of that column.
Anyway, this is exactly why I removed a couple of business rules from the system just now and replaced them with the following javascript:
function onFeeSelect(executionContext) {
var gridContext = executionContext.getFormContext();
if(gridContext.getAttribute(“<attribute_name>”) != null)
{
gridContext.getAttribute(“<attribute_name>”).controls.get(0).setDisabled(true);
}
}
That script is now attached to the onRecordSelect subgrid event only on the forms I need.
And this should do it – no more users will be updating that attribute in the editable subgrid on that particular form.