Selected Key Field

The selectedKeyField is a property on the object that identifies the object uniquely. Similar to a surrogate key, or a business key, as long as it uniquely identifies the object. When this property is set, the selected keys returns the ID values of the objects that were selected. When a row is selected in the grid, we store the selectedKeyField property of the selected object in this array collection. This allows for multiple pages of data that comes down from the server and not maintained in memory to still keep track of the ids that were selected on other pages.

If you use Flexicious in filterPageSortMode=client, this really does not apply to you, but in server mode, each page of data potentially represents a brand new dataprovider. Let's assume you have a Database table of 100,000 records, with the pageSize property set on Flexicious to 50. You load page 1, select a few items, and move on to page 2. The grid exposes a property called selectedItems, which will be lost when the new page of data is loaded. This is why we have the selectedObjects and selectedKeys property, that is, to keep the selection that was loaded in memory on prior pages of data. Now, in most LOB applications, each record can be identified by a surrogate key (or some unique identifier). This surrogate key is then used to uniquely identify different instances of at the same Object. For example, when the page 1 is loaded for the first time, there is a Employee OBJECT with EmployeeId=1. When the user selects this record, navigates to a different page, and switches back to page 1, the Employee with ID 1 is still there, and need to stay selected, but it could be an altogether different INSTANCE of the same record in the database. This is why we have the selectedKeyField property, which would in this case, be "EmployeeID" so we can uniquely identify the selection made by the user across multiple pages.