In Notes if you get the choices using an @DbColumn or @DbLookup, assign no default value and the user does not consciously pick a value, no value is assigned to the field.
But when you do that with a combobox in Xpages, the first value in the list of choices will be assigned to the field.
Usually that is not what I want, I want the user to make a conscious choice. And assigning a default value of a space does not help if that value is not in the list of choices. So you will have to add a blank value as the first option in the list of choices.
I found 2 ways to solve this and it eliminates the need to set a default value.
1. The simplest way is to add a space as the first label-value pair and for the second add the rest of the choices using @DbColumn/@DbLookup.
2. Insert a blank value in the javascript code that retrieves the list of choices using @DbColumn/@DbLookup. This is probably the better method if you also want to include code to do some form of cache. See the code sample below.
// get the cached result if used before
var list = sessionScope.<cachename>;
// if no cached values found, create it
if (!list) {
// create an array with 1 blank entry as first entry
var arr = new Array(" ");
var res = @DbLookup("", "<a view>", "<a key>", 2);
// append the retrieved values to the array
var list = arr.concat(res);
sessionScope.<cachename> = list;
}
return list;
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