User Interface

Applications created with Code On Time use a well defined entity model that prescribes presentation of data as grid and form views and determines transition of views via actions. Data may come from any source. For example, a developer can defined an SQL query or stored procedure to read data from the database. An entity can also be programmed to read/write data from a web service, file system, or any other source. Application framework interprets the entity and displays data in various view styles. For example, a typical grid view can be rendered as responsive grid, list, collection of data cards, map, and charts. Request an interactive Webex presentation to learn more.

“Calendar” is a brand new view style that will become available with update 8.5.5.0 on September 2, 2015 . A presence of a “date” field will tell application framework that there is possibility of rendering data as a calendar. New view style offers Day, Week, Month, Year, and Agenda modes. Any field in the view can serve as a “color” field. The framework will assign a color to each data value.  End users can drag and drop events to change values of date fields. Standard form view of an entity is display when an event is selected enabling seamless editing of data.

“Day” view in the screen shot shows 4 data records rendered as events.

Mini calendar on the side bar uses bold font to indicate dates of the month with events. Mini calendar alternates presentation of data between day and week mode when a particular date is clicked. Color legend shows associated data values, which represents the name of the employee assigned to the “order” event. An “event” is a record from Orders table of the Northwind sample.

“Week” view offers seven days of events. Future updates are expected to support 3 and 4 day weeks. Both “Day” and “Week” view are infinitely horizontally scrollable.

“Month” view offers infinitely scrollable events organized in months.

Click on any item in the color map on the sidebar and the application will “dim” events associated with other employees in “Day”, “Week”, “Month”, and “Agenda” views.

“Year” view offers analytical presentation of an entire year and also enables quick data-driven navigation to a month or a specific day.

“Agenda” view provides a convenient condensed summary list of events with a dynamic timeline.

All modes of the calendar view style are responsive. Smartphone users will see presentation scaled to fit the form factor of their device. For example, these two screen shots demonstrate “Day” and “Agenda” view on a typical smart phone.

These amazing capabilities require no programming or coding. Developers can opt to disable the calendar when not desired. Otherwise application will simply offer the end user yet another way to see their data.

Calendar view now joins a first class collection of presentations styles that were made available in the previous releases and greatly enhanced with this new iteration. View selector and sidebar provide access to every view style available for a particular dataset.

For example, charts view displays automatically constructed charts without developer writing any code.  Any number of custom charts can be defined when needed at design time.

“Cards” view presents data items as multi-line cards with the same size. Application framework breaks each three fields in paragraphs offering another way to see data. Cards presented in 3, 2, or 1 column based on the screen size. The screenshot shows two columns of automatically configured cards.

“List” view is the most universal presentation style that will work with fields of any length and any screen size. Field values float from left to right and continue on the next line.

“Grid” view style enhances responsive presentation by introducing automatic data balancing. The new release reduces the number of visible columns by applying 2, 5, 8, 10, and 12 column breakpoints based on screen size when data is rendered. This makes it possible to display a grid of rows with “important” fields without being forced to scroll horizontally. For example, this screenshot shows five columns of data rows in Orders table.

Developers can indicate the minimal screen size that a particular column must be displayed on. For example, tag “grid-tn” will force a column to show up even on “tiny” screen. Small screes with show every column marked as “grid-sm”. The release notes of the update will explain expected logical pixels of tiny, extra small, small, medium, large, and extra large screens.

Previous release required explicit tagging of each field. The new approach is to assume that all fields must be displayed if possible. The mere intent of a developer to place a field in a grid implies that it must visible. Developer-defined tags simply enforcing display of fields on particular screen sizes in responsive grid. The next screenshot shows 8 columns displayed when the sidebar is not visible. Automatic data balancing ensures that “shorter” fields reclaim more real estate from “longer” fields with enforced minimal width to ensure quality “balanced” presentation of data in columns with fixed width.

All view styles also support “long press” that allows displaying of context menu and selection of records on both desktop and touch-enabled devices. The screenshot above shows context-sensitive filtering and sorting options.

“Map” view style is one more method of presenting data that becomes available when latitude/longitude or Address/City fields are present in the gird view.

Context menus and data cards are now displayed at the bottom of the screen on devices with small form factor to enable easy touch operations. A couple of screenshots below show data card of “Map” view style and view selector on a small screen.

The standard collection of presentation styles will be enhanced with horizontally scrollable “Datasheet” view and “Hierarchy” view styles. The implementation of remaining view style is well under way and is based on horizontal scrolling mechanism that was developed and perfected with “Calendar” view.

Code On Time release 8.5.4.0 introduces several important enhancements.

Touch UI now uses glyphicons to indicate sort and filter state. Contents of cells in responsive grid is wrapped to maximize the amount of visible information. The same “wrapped cell” design is implemented in “data sheet” view style, which will be available soon to complement responsive grid. The new view style will display a complete set of fields that can are scrolled horizontally on any screen size. The original implementation of responsive grid displayed rows of the same height making it difficult to read the content in the cells.

User identity icon is now displayed on the menu bar. The name of the user is displayed partially or completely next to the icon if the width of the device allows that. Otherwise the user name is displayed in the popup menu assigned to the icon.

Install integrated CMS in your app with Single Page App implementation model and you can try live editing of content pages. Add a content page based on any Bootstrap template to your project and select “Edit Page” in the “More” menu. If you choose “Properties’ then the app will redirect to the site content page. Only administrators, content editors, and developers are allowed to edit content pages.

Click on any content and change it directly in the browser.

Change the properties of content items.

Select glyphicons from context menu:

Save the page directly to integrated content management system.

Content pages stored in CMS are rendered both in Desktop and Touch UI. Live editing is only supported in Touch UI. Future releases will introduce a complete set of page editing capabilities that will enable constructing appealing content without effort. A collection of page templates and content fragments will be installed directly in the CMS.

The following bug fixes and enhancements are also included:

• Master view refresh when children are changed is now supported in Touch UI. If a master view has one or more fields derived from child tables as aggregates (totals, counts, averages, etc.) then specifying “controller:NAME_OF_CHILD_DATA_CONTROLLER” in Context Fields property of a field will cause the master view to refresh and forms to recalculate the fields. This syntax is supported in both Desktop and Touch UI. The old syntax will also work.
   
• Fixed desktop CSS but that has colored glyphicons in "content" pages. Now the color is scoped to ".DataViewContainer" selector.
   
• Removed xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" from SPA apps and enhanced content encoding tag in the output markup.
   
• Introduced data-editable tag in content page templates to enable live editing of content.
   
• Site content is considered to be text if its type is "application/javascript".
   
• Desktop UI cancels pending "valueChanged" call in calcualted fields that leads to exceptions when a modal data view is closed.
   
• Client framework will pass a combined filter that includes standard user filters and advanced search options when executing actions.
   
• User Lookup does not crashes desktop UI anymore.
   
• If a popup list of options does fit entirely on screen than Touch UI does not resize the menu and instead positions it sideways.
   
• Touch UI aligns thumbnails vertically when Cards view style is active.
   
• Touch UI aligns thumbnails to the top in lists with multiple paragraphs.

Calendar View Style is Coming Soon

We are getting close to completion of the new view style called Calendar. Take a look at a few screen shots below. The new view style uses a common “horizontal infinite scrolling” infrastructure in day and week sub-views shared with the upcoming “data sheet” view style. The screen shots are displayed without data. Data will be displayed on demand when user stops scrolling. The data pivoting technology implemented to support Smarts Charts is the foundation of the Calendar view style.

Year

Month

Week

Year View on  a Small Screen