Understanding dynamic dialogs

This section provides basics about dynamic dialogs.

The ui.Dialog class can create dialog objects at runtime, to implement generic code controlling forms that are created at runtime, when the data structure is not known at compile time.

Unlike static dialog instructions, dynamic dialogs do not require a data model (that is a program variables containing the values for fields). Dynamic dialogs are created with a list for field definitions that is built at runtime, no static (RECORD) structure is required to instantiate a dynamic dialog.

Important: Dynamic dialogs are provided to resolve specific needs, like implementing a generic zoom window to select a record in a list, and control forms generated at runtime. This feature is not a replacement for regular "static" dialog instructions, used to control the forms defined in form specification files.

Dynamic dialogs use by default the UNBUFFERED mode and WITHOUT DEFAULTS. For more details, see Controlling field values.

Dynamic dialogs can be used in conjunction with base.SqlHandle objects, to get database table column information in order to build forms dynamically and define the field list.