Upgrading contacts

In the latest release, we have rebuilt Contacts. This article describes the reason for those changes and the manual steps required to upgrade contacts.

About Previous contacts design

We changed the design of contacts (part of Personal Information) from previous releases. In previous releases, contacts contained the following components:

1. A contacts block (using the contacts block type), summarising existing contacts with an Add block action and item-level actions to view and delete a contact
2. A contact basic details block (using the flexible block type) allows the contact's personal information to be updated
3. A contact phone numbers block (using the flexible block type), allowing the contact's phone numbers to be updated
4. A contact addresses block (using the flexible block type), allowing the contact's addresses to be updated

This design caused several user experience problems:

• First, each flexible block seemed like a discrete unit of functionality with Save and Edit buttons on each block. Users found this misleading because all three blocks (basic details, phones, and addresses) could only be submitted as a single transaction and processed as a single Oracle workflow, which resulted in user confusion and frustration.
• The use of the flexible block depended on over-complicated Oracle database views, which resulted in slow load and save times.
• Selecting Add created new contacts immediately, even if the user canceled the operation. That required the user to notice this and delete the draft contact afterward.

About Current contacts design

As part of the upgrade, contacts have been re-worked into a more logical and faster user experience. Now the contacts functionality is made up of the following components:

1. A contact type block summarizing existing contacts contains an Add block and item-level actions to view contact. Unchanged from the previous release, except we moved the lesser-used delete action to the view contact details page.
2. A new contact-view page. This page contains a single view-only form block, which shows the contact's basic details, phones, and addresses in a combined view. It also contains block actions to edit and delete a contact.
3. A new add-contact page. This page contains a single editable form block, where you can enter the contact's basic details, phones, and addresses in a single transaction with one Save button.
4. A new contact-edit page. This page contains a single editable form block, where you can enter the contact's basic details, phones, and addresses in a single transaction with one Save button.

Procedure

After upgrading, we no longer use the existing Fast Formula that personalizes the viewing and editing of essential details, phones, and addresses. To re-apply these personalizations, you will need to:

1. Unpublish the seeded pages:
   1. Navigate to Applaud Administrator: Setup: Pages
   2. Find the contact-view, add-contact, and contact-edit pages. The seeded pages will link to menus called XXAS_PG_CONTACT_DETAILS_VIEW, XXAS_PG_ADD_CONTACT, and XXAS_PG_CONTACT_DETAILS_EDIT, respectively.
   3. Open each page and select Unpublish.
2. Copy the seeded pages. For each of the seeded contact-view, add-contact, and contact-edit pages, you will need to copy them:
   1. Navigate to Applaud Administrator: Setup: Pages
   2. Hit Add to create a new page. Copy the page settings exactly as the seeded page, taking care to enter identical Page Ids.
   3. Navigate to Blocks and hit Add. Create a form block and copy the block settings exactly as the seeded pages. You can leave the personalization Fast Formula blank for now.
   4. Create grants to give access to the block.
   5. For the contact-view page, navigate to Block Actions and hit Add. Copy the block actions exactly as the seeded pages. You will also need to create a grant for each block action.
   6. Confirm that each page is published.
3. Write new personalization formula:

   You will need to write form personalization formulas to hide and show fields and override other field properties dynamically, such as enabled or required. For example, the contacts form is called Contacts (/public/xxas/emp/view/contactfull.xml) used in all 3 of the new contacts pages. You can see the details of the fields in this form and their Ids and default properties by navigating to Applaud Administrator: Setup: Forms.

   Once you have written the formula for viewing, adding, and editing a contact, you must update the block settings to set the personalization formula. You may use different Fast Formula for each or share the same Fast Formula across more than one of the contacts blocks.

   You may wish to personalize fields inside the address and phone multirow sections. To do this, add the following formula text:

   Contact_Addresses_Formula_Name = 'XXX_BK_CONTACT_ADDRESSES'
   Contact_Phone_Numbers_Formula_Name = 'XXX_BK_CONTACT_PHONES'

   In this case, the formula specifies that it uses another Fast Formula called XXX_BK_CONTACT_ADDRESSES to personalize each address entered and use a Fast Formula XXX_BK_CONTACT_PHONES to personalize each phone number entered. These Fast Formulas must also exist for this to work, and they should use the same Formula Type as the main personalization formula.

   The addresses multirow form is called Contact addresses (/public/xxas/emp/view/contactaddresses.xml), and the phone numbers multirow form is called Contact phone numbers (/public/xxas/emp/view/contactphonenumbers.xml).