Did you know that setting the Display Name property of your table (entity) and all fields will make screen customization even easier?
All display names you define in your data sources are automatically used in all your screens. This practically leaves you with the collection name translations in the Screens as the display name of your table is used only in singular.
Also, not only new screens are initialized by display names defined at the table level, but if you don’t change a display name manually in a screen, any change made in the table is propagated to the screen.
This makes screen customization much easier and also localization.
For less beginners or more curious than average ones: What actually happens is that LightSwitch uses the DisplayName attribute (which decorates almost all objects and their properties in LightSwitch) which is inheritable, to…display names (what else). When you first create a screen (either you have changed the display name of the table column or not) you will notice Display Name fields in the properties pane are dimmed and oblique (italic). This is to denote DisplayName attribute has not been defined but inherited instead. Once you change the display name of a field on a form, it automatically acquires it’s own DisplayName attribute and therefore the DisplayName attribute of the table column stops being inherited any more.
All display names you define in your data sources are automatically used in all your screens. This practically leaves you with the collection name translations in the Screens as the display name of your table is used only in singular.
Also, not only new screens are initialized by display names defined at the table level, but if you don’t change a display name manually in a screen, any change made in the table is propagated to the screen.
This makes screen customization much easier and also localization.
For less beginners or more curious than average ones: What actually happens is that LightSwitch uses the DisplayName attribute (which decorates almost all objects and their properties in LightSwitch) which is inheritable, to…display names (what else). When you first create a screen (either you have changed the display name of the table column or not) you will notice Display Name fields in the properties pane are dimmed and oblique (italic). This is to denote DisplayName attribute has not been defined but inherited instead. Once you change the display name of a field on a form, it automatically acquires it’s own DisplayName attribute and therefore the DisplayName attribute of the table column stops being inherited any more.
Even elements not related to tables (layout groups for example) have by default their display name dimmed and oblique.
The full story is that for every single element LightSwitch first looks for an “explicit”, so to say, DisplayName attribute. If not found then it looks for an inherited one and if not found either (the case of a new group layout) then derives the Display Name from the Name property of the element (inserting space before every upper-case letter found after a lower case one).
I hope this was actually a tip and not a trip…
I hope this was actually a tip and not a trip…
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