As you construct your Page in the Page Editor, you need to tie the
Page’s controls to the relevant
Page data. To tie a field or a group to data from the
Page Message, you use the Message Ref property. The Message Ref property associates the
Page element with an element of data from the
Page Message.
For example, suppose you want to create a search form to search an accounts table in your database. You want the form to have text-entry fields for users to search against five columns in the accounts table:
Userid,
Email,
Firstname,
Lastname and
Status.
You use the Page Message and the Message Ref property to tie each of the text-entry fields in the form to the appropriate column in the accounts table. Each element on the
Page has a property called Message Ref that ties that element to some part of the
Page Message.
The Page Message contains a
Message Part that references the accounts table (or, more accurately, the representation of that table in the
Data Model). When you create the input fields for the search form, you set the Message Ref property for each input field to the element in the
Page Message that corresponds to the relevant column in the accounts table.
Every element on the page has a Message Ref, which can be either implicitly or explicitly specified. If a particular element does not have a defined Message Ref, then it inherits the Message Ref of the parent element.