Introduction

XPages Release 852 includes a number of improvements for working with Views, which should be useful for XPages developers working with very larger data sets.

1. View Category Filters
• An XPages a developer can now specify multiple levels of categorisation for the Category Filter of a View
• In release 851, only a single category could be specified.
• Multiple levels of category filters can be supplied by passing in a set of categories separated with a backslash, e.g. Burlington, MA\Ewing finds all the entries in the View that have Burlington, MA as a city, and Ewing as the last name.
• The View, that is the DataSoruce for the View Panel must have the Sort property set for the columns that need to be part of the Category Filtering.
2. View Start Key
• An XPages developer can now specify that the contents of a View will start from a particular row in the data set using the startKeys property of the View Data Source
3. View Last Page
4. XPages developers now have a option in the Pager control to calculate the last page in a view, so that a user can go directly to that page without having to scroll though all intervening pages.
• Note that there is a performance penalty for calculating the last page.

View Category Filters

When working XPagesIn XPages 8.5.1 - View Panels only worked with single category filter. Now multiple View Category filter can be applied by specify them as a list, separated by a backslash character, i.e. '\'.

The Category Filter(s) for a View can be set in the Data section for the XPages View Controls Properties tab.

You can als specify the Category Filter via URL parameters, e.g


Or programmatically, since, like most properties in XPages, it is computable via ServerSideJavaScript. See the Figure below, for an example.

View Start Key

In XPages 8.5.2, startKeys is a property that lets an XPages developer set the first rows of data that will appear in a View.

The example below, shows some JavaScript that sets a Session Scope variable, StartKey, when a button is clicked. When the button is clicked, the XPages is submitted to the server, and the DataSoruce is read. The DataSource for the View has a property (see the data area properties in the All Properties section for the Properties tab for the View.
It is setting a property for the data, startKeys

View Last Page

By default, when an XPages opens a View with very large data set and a Pager has been enabled,

the user will initiall have next and previous icons on which they can click to scroll forwards and backwards through the set of data. If they scroll to the second, or subsequent pages, they will always have the ability to get back to the start of the data set by clicking on the "Go to first page" icon (a triangle with a vertical bar to the left).

Notice, that if the user wants to get to the last page of the data set, they can't, there is only a "Next Page" icon. The icon for the "Go to Last Page" will not appear until the user has paged to the penultimate page - which may require a lot of a clicking and take quite a while to get there.


In XPages Release 8.5.2, there is now a new Pager property that can be set to enable the "Go to Last page" icon immediately.

Set this property to true.


and when a user opens the XPages with the View that has the large data set

they can immediately go to the last page.