data presentation separation

[sandeep_rp1]

I've a custom lookup combobox control that renders tree dropdown. This control retrieves data using fetchxml from base entity for rendering tree nodes. I want to use same control rendering logic for different use cases within my application but with different data.

I want to keep data and presentation separate. Data fetchxml logic potentially can live in side my webresource and I want my control to simply use this data and render it.  It does not make sense for me to write different control for each instance with hardcoded fetchxml.

any idea how can I achieve this data presentation separation? 

thanks

[a33ik]

Hello,

You can mimic what I did in my Dependent Optionset control - https://github.com/AndrewButenko/DependentOptionset_PCF

You can place your configuration to webresource and retrieve the content and use it afterwards. To point to the "configurational" webresource you can use "input" property.

[ben-thompson]

I'm literally checking my talk for PCF Saturday (tomorrow) and I'm just covering this topic at this moment

There are 3 ways to store you data in a way that is accessible from within your pcf component.

Using a Web Resource (which does require creating it somehow and would ideally be XML

using (the newer) environment variables - which should be text or a serialized JSON object but allows you to create a default value that you ship with your solution that can be overridden by a local version without any real effort.

Using a custom configuration entity - I usually end up going for this 3rd approach as while there is the issue that security roles will need to be slightly modified to ensure users can read the entity record it provides way more flexibility when you want to offer variations (plus I have a set of meta data PCF components at https://github.com/bthompson-365/PCF-Metadata that make creating these entities very easy)

In all 3 cases the easiest way of implementing it within your PCF component is to use an input text field (which still has a maximum length of 100 characters) and then get your code to download the appropriate object based on the value entered.

[sandeep_rp1]

thanks for your response and example.

I would like to have specific methods exposed by the webresource to perform certain operations like data retrieval/data search from server based on user interactions inside component.

Essentially I need my webresource to be a data provider that needs to implement interface that my control is looking for. So that my control can invoke methods in data provider and knows nothing about actual implementation.

Is there any such possible implmentation?

[ben-thompson]

PCF components are just Javascript attached to an attribute on a form - and at the moment everything is / has to be contained within a single bundled file. So for the moment it's not possible.

[rajyraman]

@sandeep_rp1- You can move the data retrieval/search part to an Action, and then use Xrm.WebApi in PCF to call the action. Since you need to create the Action only once, all the data retrieval/search would live in the Action and will happen on server-side.

[ben-thompson]

@rajyraman I did consider suggesting that but the execute command is not currently supported by PCF so while you can use it (<any>context.webAPI).execute and it works for the moment there is no guarantee that you won't wake up one day and discover it's stopped working.

[sandeep_rp1]

Be ideal if PCF supported custom data provider support for PCFs. that would work for all scenarios where PCF needs standard CDS entity data/custom view or fetchxml/any static data/external data.

[DianaBirkelbach]

Hi @sandeep_rp1 , 

If you use a dataset PCF, you can configure the datasets at design time. That way you don't need to configure fetchXML in  some WebResource, but you let the customizer choose view(s), and you get the data inside your PCF provided for you. You could even use more datasets in one PCF if needed. You can also use input parameter in order to read the value of the "lookup combobox", and you would need to write the value by yourself using webAPI, but you can define a parameter for your PCF for that purpose.

Nothing hard-coded.

Maybe my blog about dataset PCFs can help (there are 3 parts) : seamless integration , extensibility , multiple datasets 

Best regards,
Diana
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