By the end of this chapter you will understand what an Open Screen action is and how to use them, and you will have created an Open Screen Actionflow in your application.

What is an Open Screen Action?

The 

Creating Open Screen Actions

How do you add them (toolbar click and drag, or drag from toolbar), 

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Worked Example

Here's a worked example using the school course data.

We want to be able to add and edit the courses in our School Courses grid. To do this, we will create two Open Screen Actionflows. Both will open the same screen but when we are adding a new course, we want an empty input form, and when we are editing an existing course, we want the input form to contain course data.

Note: When creating a new screen in PhixFlow there is a Grid Actions wizard that will configure the Create, Read, Update and Delete (CRUD) actions for you. For the purposes of understanding the mechanics of Actionflows, we will create these manually.

Open Screen to Add New Data

1. Open the Course Management screen where the Actionflow will be initiated from
2. Right-click on the button and choose 

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3. Enter a name for the action
   1. Name: Add Course
4. Click the 

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   _action_screen _action_screen nopanel true

    icon in the toolbar to display the existing screens in your application
5. Drag the Course Form screen from the Repository onto the canvas to create an Open Screen node
   1. Alternatively, drag the 

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      _action_screen _action_screen nopanel true

       icon from the toolbar onto the canvas and follow the steps to create or open an existing screen
6. Connect the Open Screen node to the button by selecting Click to Connect
7. For the input, choose the On Click Action Event, then select Connect Input
8. Click and drag the 

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   _driving_interface_connection_point _driving_interface_connection_point name icon nopanel true

    icon onto the Open Course Form node to connect the input to the action
9. Close the Actionflow to return to the Course Management screen
10. Lock the screen and press the  button to see the Actionflow in action
    1. We can see that the Actionflow is working because it displays an empty form

Open Screen to Edit Existing Data

1. On the Course Management screen, where the Actionflow will be initiated from, right-click on the  button and choose 

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   _actionflow_add _actionflow_add nopanel true

2. Enter a name for the action
   1. Name: Edit Course
3. Click the 

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   _action_screen _action_screen nopanel true

    icon in the toolbar to display the existing screens in your application
4. Drag the Course Form screen from the Repository onto the canvas to create an Open Screen node
   1. Alternatively, drag the 

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      _action_screen _action_screen nopanel true

       icon from the toolbar onto the canvas and follow the steps to create or open an existing screen
5. Connect the Open Screen node to the  button by selecting Click to Connect
6. For the input, choose the School_Courses View Component, then select Connect Input
7. The Mappings window will open:
   1. Drag the CourseID attribute from the left (Tile Body) to the right (Edit Course), then click Save
   2. 
8. Click and drag the 

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   _driving_interface_connection_point _driving_interface_connection_point name icon nopanel true

    icon onto the Open Course Form node to connect the input to the action
9. Right-click the connection wire between the input node and Open Screen node on the canvas
10. Choose Open Mappings and the Mappings window will open:
    1. Drag the CourseID attribute from the left (Edit Course) to the right (Open Course Form), then click Save
11. Close the Actionflow to return to the Course Management screen
12. Lock the screen and press the button to see the Actionflow in action
    1. We can see that the Actionflow is working because it displays the data from the School Courses grid to the edit form