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User Interface
Thursday, March 25, 2021PrintSubscribe
Lines, Lines, Lines

 Horizontal and Vertical Lines

The signature feature of Touch UI is the “lined paper” style of data presentation. A list of items is rendered in the table format that looks like a spreadsheet. A single data item is displayed in a form with the rows of values separated by horizontal lines. The reading pane mode provides a great example of that.


The height of each row is automatically adjusted to fit the content. The form will also distribute the field values in multiple columns if the floating is enabled and the form is wide enough.


Developers have a great control over the horizontal and vertical lines globally and on the fine-grained level. Let’s learn more about it.

Grid Lines

The vertical lines in the grid can be hidden in the file ~/touch-settings.json:


Setting the ui.grid.lines.vertical property to false will hide the vertical lines and force the framework to display the “n/a” abbreviation in the empty data cells in a muted color to provide a visual point of reference for the “null” values.


Compare this to the default presentation with the horizontal and vertical lines, where the “empty” values are easy to spot without a visual aid.


If you prefer the default grid presentation with the horizontal and vertical lines but need to hide the vertical lines in a particular data view, then have it tagged as
grid-lines-vertical-none to achieve the same effect.

If the opposite effect is needed then hide the horizontal lines by setting the ui.grid.lines.horizontal to false in ~/touch-settings.json or tag a view as grid-lines-horizontal-none.


The minimalist presentation can be achieved by turning the horizontal and vertical lines “off” either in ~/touch-setting.json or by tagging a data view simultaneously with the two tags.


This is the no-lines view in the grid:


The boundaries of the selected field value are easy to see in the inline editing mode whether or not the grid has a look of a spreadsheet.

Form Lines

Get that minimalist look in the forms by getting rid of the horizontal lines.


You can accomplish that by setting ui.form.lines.horizontal option to false in ~/touch-settings.json


The tag form-lines-horizontal-none will hide the horizontal lines in a data view form shown below.


Form with the horizontal lines hidden will display an “Optional” text as a placeholder for the fields that accept the “null” value. The placeholders are visible when the end user is entering a new record or editing an existing one. This standard placeholder text can be overridden by setting a custom placeholder for the data field in the data controller view.


Finally you can have the lines to wrap around the field values like this.


The “outlined” input focus will work well when the input lines are enabled. This configuration of ~/touch-settings.json will display the lines around the text inputs and show the thick outline in the accent color of the theme when an input is focused.


Friday, January 8, 2021PrintSubscribe
Reading Pane
Touch UI provides the built-in option to display the details of the selected record side-by-side with the master list.

Reading Pane

Popular email applications have proven this presentation style to be very effective. The end user can view the details of the selected message and has the quick access to the contents of the inbox.

The prototype of this presentation style has been a part of the framework for the past two years. Our team was able to bring it to the production state just now. The technical challenge was to provide a simultaneous access to the master and detail panes each holding a virtual page of the Touch UI application. A consistent styling has also been worked out.



The reading pane detail is empty by default. The placeholder area is filled with the standard background image that can be changed in ~/touch-settings.json through the ui.readingPane.background parameter. Set the option to false to disable the image or specify your own alternative (for example, ~/images/app-bkg.jpg).



The modal form fills this area when a selection is made in the master list or a new item is created. Both master and detail panes can be scrolled and are fully interactive. The familiar form buttons are migrated to the top of the detail pane and have icons to complement the toolbar of the master pane.



Set the option ui.actions.form.icons to true to enable action icons in all forms of the app. By default, only the form buttons in the reading pane are rendered with icons.

If the reading pane is not enabled then the familiar modal presentation will take place when the user is interacting with the master list.


Any forms activated from the detail pane are displayed on the top of the reading pane.


The option to enable the reading pane is available to the end user through the view selector if the screen size is that of a typical tablet. Developers can also tag the data view on the page as reading-pane-auto to activate the reading pane by default. The option and the mode are not activated if the screen is small.


Touch UI allows specifying the default minimal size of the reading pane master and detail in ~/touch-settings.json through the options ui.readingPane.minLeft, ui.readingPane.minRight, ui.readingPane.minTop, and ui.readingPane.minBottom. The default value for these options is 375 measured in pixels.

The device with the vertical orientation will display the reading pane detail at the bottom of the screen.



The master pane displays all supported presentation styles.


Hover over or touch the middle divider and drag it to the desired position to change the panes.


The responsive Touch UI will present the data in the best way possible within the available space of master and detail panes.


The reading pane mode enhances the productivity of the end users and requires zero effort on the part of the developer. If for any reason this mode is not desirable, then disable it with ui.readingPane.enabled option in ~/touch-settings.json. The reading pane mode is available only on the pages with a single master dataview.
Wednesday, May 22, 2019PrintSubscribe
Removing Header Text from Views
The responsive user interface of apps created with Code On Time is intuitive.  Nevertheless the grids and forms do display generic text to provide basic user instructions.

This is an example of a grid view with the header text displayed above the data.


This is how the data form may look.


Each description can be changed individually in the Project Designer.

If you prefer a minimalist user interface then the descriptions may appear to be excessive. The unique architecture of apps created with Code On Time makes possible altering various aspects of an app with a just few lines of code.

For example, enable shared business rules in your app by selecting the corresponding option in Settings | Database Model & Business Logic | Shared Business Rules section of the project configuration. Re-generate the app. If you have existing custom "code" business rules, then open each rule and change the base class from BusinessRules to SharedBusinessRules.

Application framework will create an instance of SharedBusinessRules class or a custom version of it whenever a client request is processed through the server-side code. The framework retrieves the XML description of the corresponding data controller to handle the request.Then it provides the app with a chance to perform changes to the in-memory copy of the data controller. If the matching business rules class indicates that it supports data controller virtualization (customization at runtime), then the customization code is invoked. By default, no customization is performed. Developer can override virtualization code to make changes to the controller.

The header text definitions in views of data controllers are as shown in this sample:



Changed the file ~/app/App_Code/custom/Rules/SharedBusinessRules.cs as follows:

namespace MyCompany.Rules
{
    public partial class SharedBusinessRules : MyCompany.Data.BusinessRules
    {

        public override bool SupportsVirtualization(string controllerName)
        {
            return true;
        }

        protected override void VirtualizeController(string controllerName)
        {
            NodeSet().SelectViews().SetHeaderText(string.Empty);
        }
    }
}

Save the code file and observe that all views in the app are displayed without descriptions:



You can customize your data controllers selectively by inspecting the name of the data controller specified in the argument of VirtualizeController method.

Take you minimalist presentation even further by removing category descriptions in form views with this code.

protected override void VirtualizeController(string controllerName)
{
    NodeSet().SelectViews().SetHeaderText(string.Empty)
        .SelectCategory("c1").SetHeaderText(string.Empty).SetDescription(string.Empty);
}

Your forms will now have an even more streamlined data-only presentation:


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