How to override the default behavior when clicking a button

• 2 minutes to read

Sometimes you may want to just override the default functionality of the button events. Here is how to do that for the Save button in the Sale dialog.

Let's look at the controlgroup that contains the Save button logic. Opening the Sale dialog, scroll down to the DlgButtonBar controlgroup. I'm going to trim all the fat out of it and focus on the key, and that is the okonclick element in the config element.

<control group id="DlgButtonBar" type="OkCancelButtonBar" bottom="10px" height… >
  <datasource>EntityDataHandler.SaleEntity</datasource>
    <controls>
      ...
    </control>
  </controls>
  <config>
    ...
    <okonclick>javascript:Dialog.closeWithCallback();<okonclick>
    ...
  </config>
</controlgroup>

Changing this changes the behavior of the save operation. For example, you can, instead of calling the closeWithCallback method, you can replace it with your own JavaScript method. However, doing it this way will have unexpected results, i.e. the Sale dialog will not close, the archives in the main page will not refresh, and so on.

So, what’s the correct way to do this? Modify the okonclick element by adding the callback attribute and setting it to false, and then specify your JavaScript method to call.

<controlgroup id="DlgButtonBar" type="OkCancelButtonBar" bottom="10px" height="30px" … >
  <datasource>EntityDataHandler.SaleEntity<datasource>
  <controls>
    ...
  <controls>
  <config>
    <okonclick callback="false">yourJSMethod();</okonclick>
    ...
  </config>
</controlgroup>

This all depends on your JavaScript method, which you can seed through an SoScriptControl (place this before the first control in the first view (SaleCommonView) in the page config:

<control id="CustomSaleScript" type="SoScriptControl">
  <config>
    <switch value="1" binding="none">
      <case operator="equal" value="1">
      </case>
    </switch>
  </config>
</control>

Hope this helps.