Questions on the Collection Widget

[mfgpartner]

Hi. Anyone here with much experience with the new Collection Widget? I'm on ThingWorx 8.2.3 and I've seen some PTC support tickets that seem like some major fixes that are in 8.2.5 and 8.3, but what I'm trying to do here is pretty basic so I figured I'll ask around before upgrading my server.

1. I'm simply trying to get the embedded mashup to show at the moment, but nothing shows up. The embedded mashup just has a text box that says "hello" in it. On the collection widget, I've supplied Data (comes from a service that returns an Users table from one of our systems. The User_Id is unique), and mapped the UIDField to the User_Id field. I expected the collection widget to build a cell per user, but the mashup comes up blank. I've also tried adding a mashup parameter (username) and adding {"Username":"username"} to the MashupPropertyBinding since the helpcenter says its important, but it still comes up blank. What else is needed to get the collection widget to work?

Figured out #1. Had to clear my cache completely. First time I've had to do this for a completely new widget though. Had to do it a couple times from hot widget fixes.

2. One of the features of the Repeater widget I liked and constantly used was the ability to pass "All fields" from the repeater widget to an infotable mashup parameter on the repeated mashup. This basically sent the row's data down into the repeated mashup. In turn, I could hook the infotable's value field to a value display widget, but get to use the other fields in the infotable as a dependent field for state formatting. Is there a keyword, i.e. All Fields to use with the MashupPropertyBinding property so I can map all the current row's data down? Or do I have to build a layered JSON string to map the infotable? 

3. Unlike the repeater widget, the collection widget's Data property has arrows pointing both ways.. indicating data can come out from the collection. What data are we exactly talking about? Can we use it to modify data in each cell and have it come back up to the parent mashup for a mass update?

Thanks!

[pselvaraj-1]

Hi,

I am using treeadvacned grid to hierarchy data in one of our mashups. I wanted to replace tree advacned grid with collection widget and yet to try. Since you already explored i hope will it user friendly to show case or any bugs there. Thanks!

[bmihaiciuc]

Hi,

For #2, collection doesn't have any similar functionality. Instead, you can define an infotable parameter on your mashup in addition to the regular parameter themselves and bind from the other mashup parameters to the All Data section of the infotable parameter. Then you can bind from that infotable to the value display to gain access to the other fields. This solution works in all cases where you might want to use multiple separate fields for state formatting. See the attached screenshot for more details.

For #3, collection updates the Data property when in your cell mashups you have something bound back to a mashup parameter that's a collection field. In that case, collection will update the Data property with the new values.

[pselvaraj-1]

Im able to display records with collections say a image and string value. The problem is when I scroll down down few of the rows or columns disappear. Any idea?

[bmihaiciuc]

You likely have duplicate values in the field you selected as UIDField. Collection requires each row to have a unique value for this field (which among other things enables collection to figure out how data updates and run the nice transition animations) - if this value is non-unique you will run into all sorts of issues including missing cells.