The Update Controls on Screen action allows you to change the value of a control (objects and fields) on the screen.
For example, this can be used to update the display text on a text object, or an option in a dropdown.
Not every control can be updated via this action, however. Here are a list of objects that can be updated:
Button
Button Menu
Checkbox
DateTime Picker
Dropdown
HTML Editor
Payment Widget
Picture
Radio Button
Text
Text Input
Toggle
Parameters
This action requires the following parameters to be filled:
▶ Control to Update: the control on screen to change. This includes objects and fields.
▶ Update control using this value: the value can be typed in manually or pulled from the session, action results, or other controls.
▶ Add another control: you can update multiple controls at a time in this action.
Example Scenario
In this scenario, we are going to reverse engineer the Activity screen to showcase how the Update Controls on Screen action works.
If you open up an existing activity, you will see a screen similar to this:
In this example, we are only concerned with the header text which displays "Activity:453". In design mode, the Activity:453 is displayed using a text object called "Activity" as shown below.
This field is updated in the screen's Active Record Change event (more information on this event in our article List of Events).
When you select that event, there are a lot of actions, but we'll focus on two of them:
Character Functions - this action joins together the text "Activity:" with the Record ID of the activity and stores it in an action result called resultActivityHeader.
Update Controls On Screen - this action takes that action result and updates the Activity text control which we will cover below.
When you select the Update Controls on Screen action (action #8 in the list), you will see how it is configured.
As you can see, all this action is doing is taking the action result resultActivityHeader and updating the text in the text object Activity.
As a result, the activity header will properly display the Record ID of the activity being viewed.
