How to integrate value help and suggestions in user inputs

Written by Andreas Dallner
March 12, 2025

Why use value help and/or suggestions?

Integrating value help and suggestions in the input widget guides your users, increases data quality, and speeds up identifying the correct values. Especially on inputs allowing certain values only using value help dialogs increases the user’s experience a lot.

But it can be repetitive if you handle the value help by adding all required widgets to your screens and loading the data by adding Business Object/Connector Calls or UI Actions in your Process Stories.

Therefore our input widget comes with built-in value help and suggestions. There is no need to add further widgets or Process Stories anymore.

Tabular value help for input widget

Prerequisites

To implement value help and suggestions as shown in this knowledge base article, you need to get the latest Standard Content for your Simplifier Version.

Get the latest Standard Content

STEP 1: Define the data source for your value help/suggestions

First of all, add an input widget to your screen. Open the widget’s properties by selecting it in the WYSIWYG-Editor and define the following properties in the Standard section:

  • valueHelpSource -> Set to Business Object or Variable
  • valueHelpSourceObject -> Set the Server-side Business Object’s name (if the source is ‘Business Object’) or the Variable’s name (if the source is ‘Variable’)
  • valueHelpSourceFunction -> If the source is ‘Business Object’, set the function’s name that returns the value help data

Data is now retrieved automatically. The property ‘showValueHelp’ will be activated in your application by default, even if it is deactivated in the properties.

Define the input's value help data source

The user requires execution permission on the configured business object. Use projects or global roles to grant the permission.

STEP 2: Define the value help’s column titles (optional)

The widget analyses the Server-side Business Object’s/Variable’s result set and displays all included properties. By default, the properties’ names are shown as column titles of the value help table. If you want to customize the header titles, just add them as a comma-separated list in the property valueHelpColumnTitles. The property is also translatable to empower the value help in multinational Applications as well.

Define the column titles of your input's value help

STEP 3: Advanced configuration of your value help (optional) 

If you want to change the value help’s behavior, you can set the following properties in Advanced section:

Property Description
valueHelpTitle The value help dialog’s title is ‘Select an item’. If required, you can change it by editing the property valueHelpTitle
valueHelpResultPath The data used as value help is dynamically retrieved based on this property.

If empty (default), it is checked first, if the result set of the Business Object/value of the Variable contains a property ‘result’ that is an array. If so, the property’s value is used as value help content.

If not, the result set/variable value is searched for arrays/collections. The first array found is then used as value help data.

Setting a result path in this property overwrites the default behavior. Now the value of the result path in the result set/variable is used as value help content.

Note: If the data is not an array, the value help will be deactivated
valueHelpColumns You do not want to display all properties of the value help content or change the order of columns? Just add a comma-separated list of properties. Only the defined properties will be shown. The order of the comma-separated list os also used for the displayed columns
valueHelpProperty By default, the value of the first column of the selected value help item is used to set the input’s value. If another column’s value should be used, simply set the property’s name here.
Advanced properties to configure input value help

STEP 4: Activate input suggestion (optional) 

By default, only a value help dialog is activated. In addition, you can also active suggestions items by setting the property ‘showSuggestion’. Now a tabular suggestion is shown while typing in the input field.

Suggestion items for input widget

STEP 5: Deploy application

Now deploy and try out the integrated value help and suggestions!

Requesting the value help

If you need more complex value help, you can still use our low-code features to implement it as required.

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