Xataface Forums

I have encountered an interesting situation with one of my tables. I have a view which requires a compound primary key. It is a table based on a calendar with repeating events. The view itself works fine in Xataface.

In another table, I am using a lookup widget to pick dates from the view. They show up correctly in the lookup widget list, but they were not being saved to the database. I was using an INT field to save the ID, but they were all saved as 0, so I changed it to VARCHAR to see if it would display a text value.

As it turns out, this is what is being stored in the database for this field:

tablename_view?keyid1=XX&keyid2=XX (where XX is replaced by the actual ID numbers)

Is this normal? I wasn't sure quite what to expect here, but if I leave this field set to VARCHAR, it does work properly now.

Yes. This is not documented but is normal. The lookup widget will return the value of the primary key for the id if there is a single column primary key. If there is a multi-column primary key, it instead returns the Xataface unique record id. Xataface record Ids are in the format
tablename?key1=val1&key2=val2

The Xataface API has a number of functions designed to deal with this type of ID, and it's relatively easy to parse if you need a particular key value.

-Steve

Perfect, thanks! I will add a pointer to this post in the wiki.