Customer Data Management & Form Integration

What is Mongoose?

Mongoose is Infor’s premiere application development framework.

It provides rapid development of applications that use relational databases, ranging from large enterprise software to small web portals.

Mongoose enables you to build any combination of simple, high-productivity Graphical User Interface apps (sometimes called “GUI apps”) and unique portal or dashboard type apps.

Mongoose allows users and customers to adapt and upgrade their applications to a virtually unlimited extent to fit their business needs.

Development is done with minimal coding, with the forms, business objects, and server-side logic defined mostly in metadata, rather than in code.

User and customer extensions are also metadata, so they upgrade automatically. Mongoose applications are enterprise-class, with simple configuration and deployment, and can easily be moved between on-premise and cloud installations

Getting Started

For these sessions we’ll be using the Mongoose Web Designer. To launch Mongoose, From the Navigation menu select the OS application.

Select Mongoose from either the tab on the top of the screen or use the security card, located on the main page.

Click Ok to log into the default tenant.

Opening the Users form

There are three ways to open a form in Mongoose:

• From the Form > Open menu (or Ctrl+O).
• In the Mongoose Explorer.
• From the list of recently used forms from the Form menu.

Select Form > Open. In the Filter field, type: users.

Select the Users (UsersMaint) form and click Ok.

Alternatively, you can use the Mongoose Explorer. In the Explorer, you can either use the Master Explorer option, or create and use your own My Folders shortcuts.

In the Master Explorer, you can expand All Forms and then browse to the Users form. To open it, double-click the form name.

Lastly, you can open a form from the list of recently used forms. This list displays the last 10 forms that you have accessed. You can view this list from the Form menu.

Using Filter-In-Place

Once the form opens, it is in the default Filter-In-Place mode.

This mode allows you to type filter criteria into any field on the form. These filter criteria help to reduce the number of records that are returned and displayed.

Let’s filter to locate your user profile. Type your email address into the User Name field.

To execute that filter—that is, to leave Filter-In-Place mode and retrieve all records that meet the filter criteria—click the Filter-In-Place icon on the toolbar or press F4.

Editing permissions

We want to now set the editing permissions. By default, this is set to Basic. This particular editing level only allows users to open and modify existing forms as their own user versions of the forms.

In this Tutorial, we need to have Site Developer permissions, so that we can create new forms.

From the Editing Permissions drop-down list, select Site Developer, and then click the Save icon on the toolbar.

We also want to have Super User privileges so we can open mongoose core forms. To do so, check the Super User checkbox at the top.

Click Save.

Using shortcuts

We’re going to be using the form named IDO Projects frequently, so let’s create a shortcut to that form in the Mongoose Explorer, under My Folders

To access the Mongoose Explorer, click the Explorer menu item. Right-click on the My Folders section and select New Shortcut from the menu.

To create the shortcut, browse to the IDO Projects form and click Ok.

You will now see the IDO Projects shortcut.

IDO projects

Open the IDO Projects form. This form is used to create an IDO project, which is a logical grouping of business objects called Intelligent Data Objects (IDOs).

Query the projects from Filter-In-Place mode by clicking the toolbar icon as before, or by pressing F4. You will now see all the existing IDO projects.

Create a new IDO project by clicking the New icon on the toolbar (circled here) or by pressing Ctrl+N. Notice that a blue star appears in the new row that was inserted into the grid. This means that it is a new record.

In the Project Name field, type: HelloWorld.

Click Save and close the form.

Setting user preferences

Let’s open our user preferences modal so we can touch on some important user settings. From the View menu select User Preferences.

Select the Unload IDO Metadata With Forms option.

Layout options

While in the User Preferences dialog box, select the Layout tab. Here you can set the theme and the basic layout you want to use for your application. We will dive into themes deeper later on.

Keep the default option of Tabbed Form Layout selected.

Click Ok.

Unload All Global Form Objects to clear the cache.

Select Form > Definition > Unload All Global Form Objects

Creating a form

Launch the Web Designer by clicking the “Open designer in a new window” toolbar icon (circled here).

In the Identify Your Editing Scope dialog box, select Site Default, and then click Ok.

Click this link for more information on Setting Editing Scope in Design Mode.

To launch the Form Wizard, click the New Form Definition icon on the toolbar (circled here).

For the Category, select NewData, and for the Wizard, select Maintenance. Click Ok.

The New Data Maintenance Wizard (NDMW) allows us to create a table, an IDO, and a form all at once, everything we need to create a fully functioning form.

In the IDO Name field, type: Customer

This will be the name for our table, IDO, and form.

In the IDO Project Name field, select HelloWorld.

In the Table Alias field, type: cust

Keep all of the other defaults.

Create the three properties listed here, using the Add Row button to add each property:

Click Next, and then click Finish.

After the table and IDO are created, the New Data Maintenance Wizard asks if you want to create a form. Click Yes.

This launches the New Form Wizard. This wizard steps you through the creation of the Customer form. Here you specify what properties you want to include on your form.

In the Name field, type: Customer, and then click Next.

Keep all of the default selected properties of Address, ID, and Name.

Click Next.

Use the arrow buttons on the right to reposition the properties so that they are in this order: ID, Name, Address.

Click Next, and then click Finish.

Once the form loads, you can close the New Data Maintenance Wizard.

Change Component Type

After your form opens in the Web Designer window, select the Address Edit (Address) component.

In the Properties panel on the right, change the component Type from Edit to MultilineEdit.

Click-and-drag the corner handle of the component to make the field larger.

If your Address field has a label of sAddress, this is because it is a new string and does not have a string value defined.

To add the new string value, click the AddressStatic component, and click the ellipsis (•••) button next to the Caption field.

When you see the prompt asking if you want to create the string, click Yes.

Use the default String Value of “Address” and click Ok.

Click Save.

Switch back to the runtime mode tab in your browser and open your Customer form. The form automatically opens in Add mode.

Create some customers by using the New icon from the toolbar.

Click Save.

Summary:

We created an IDO project named HelloWorld. We then use the new data maintenance wizard to create our customer table and columns. These tables are stored in the app database inside mongoose. Once the table was created, the new data maintenance wizard created our customer IDO which holds all the properties, these IDO’s are stored in the objects database in Mongoose. Lastly we created a form using the form that link to the columns on the table wizard that uses our customers IDO as a primary collection. This allows us to bind our components to properties on the IDO. All the forms metadata is stored in the forms database in Mongoose.

Here is the Part 1 video showing the detailed steps to complete the previous tasks.