Custom Types

[mgbowman]

If I create a SimpleType according to the example in the feature explorer, I get a XML parser error due to the document not being well-formed. Moving the SimpleType declarations inside the DataSource tags gives me "No such type 'zip', not processing ..." errors by the Validation class.

Exactly how / where do I put the SimpleType declarations to make them available to my data source fields?

Thanks,
--mgbowman

[Isomorphic]

Hi mgbowman,
The easiest way to do this is to add a "types" block to your dataSource and embed the type definition directly in it.
For example:

<DataSource
    ID="someDS"
    serverType="sql"
>
    <fields>
        <field name="itemID"      type="sequence" hidden="true"       primaryKey="true"/>
        <field name="zipcode"         type="zip"     title="Zip Code" required="true"/>
    </fields>
    <types>
        <type ID="zip" inheritsFrom="text">
            <validators>
                <validator type="regexp" errorMessage="Must be zipcode format"
                           expression="^\d{5}(-\d{4})?$"/>
            </validators>
        </type>
    </types>
</DataSource>

This gives you client and server side validation behavior automatically.

You could also define a SimpleType object in XML as demonstrated in the Feature Explorer example and load it via the isomorphic:XML tag in a JSP. This will work for client side validation only however - the client is aware of the SimpleType but you'd have to add your own separate validation logic to the server if using this approach.