Associating Attribute Sets with Field Components

When several fields in the datasets used by your application share common formatting properties (such as Alignment, DisplayWidth, DisplayFormat, EditFormat, MaxValue, MinValue, and so on), and you have saved those property settings as attribute sets in the Data Dictionary, you can easily apply the attribute sets to fields without having to recreate the settings manually for each field. In addition, if you later change the attribute settings in the Data Dictionary, those changes are automatically applied to every field associated with the set the next time field components are added to the dataset.

To apply an attribute set to a field component

Double-click the dataset to invoke the Fields editor.
Select the field for which to apply an attribute set.
Invoke the context menu and choose Associate Attributes.
Select or enter the attribute set to apply from the Associate Attributes dialog box. If there is an attribute set in the Data Dictionary that has the same name as the current field, that set name appears in the edit box.

Warning: If the attribute set in the Data Dictionary is changed at a later date, you must reapply the attribute set to each field component that uses it. You can invoke the Fields editor and multi-select field components within a dataset when reapplying attributes.