Understanding bound forms

A form designed to retrieve and manipulate data in one or more IDO collections is referred to as a bound form. A collection is the result set returned by an IDO. The relationship between a form and an IDO is determined by specifying the collection to which the form is bound; the specification associates a form with the result set that is returned by a particular IDO.

Just as a form may be bound to a collection, a form component may have a data binding. In the simplest case, a form component's data binding is a property from the IDO that returns data from the form's collection. This relationship means that the bound component can be used to display and edit the value of the data binding property of the currently selected IDO item.

For example, a bound “grid form” operates very much like a spreadsheet. A collection is queried into the form and displayed in a tabular format. You can delete, insert, or modify IDO items in the collection. These changes are committed to the database when you save the form.