User Interface

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User Interface
Wednesday, April 7, 2021PrintSubscribe
UI State Storage & Cleanup

The state of the user interface in the apps built with Touch UI is maintained on the client. Authenticated users find the search criteria, filters, sort expressions, view styles, theme choice, and many other traces of their interactions with the app to be persisted between sessions. This makes it easy to pick up where you left off on the same device even when the browser window is closed and opened again. The app framework uses the local storage of the web view for this purpose. Each identity used to sign into the app will have its own UI state.

Touch UI can be configured to keep the user interface state in the session storage of the web view instead. The user interface state will persist while the browser window is open. App users start with the clean slate when the session is started in the new window.

Set the option ui.state.storage to session in ~/touch-settings.json configuration file to enable this behavior of the UI.


User identities and avatars are still persisted in the local storage to avoid having the user to sign in while moving between the app pages and browsing sessions. So are the global choices such as the theme and the presence of the sidebar.

Another related option allows controlling whether the user interface state is cleared when the user logs in or logs out. Option ui.state.clear is set to never by default. Developers may choose to clear the user-specific application state on the client upon logout. Value always will force the app to clear the UI state both on login and logout.

If the app is expected to be used on the shared devices, then setting the UI state storage to session and having it cleared always will eliminate any potential data exposure that can be exploited by the individuals with the physical access to the device. Recommend the end users to sign out and to close the browser or app when not in use.

Cloud On Time app executes the front end of the applications created with Code On Time from the locally stored HTML pages. Neither localStorage nor the sessionStorage objects are available in the web view. The entire set of local data specific to the user is removed from the device when the user signs out.

Touch UI application in the screenshot is running as the Progressive Web App and behaves just like the app in the web browser. It will retain the minimized sidebar, the data filter, and the reading pane mode when restarted by the user if the options ui.state.storage and ui.state.clear are not specified in the application configuration.




Tuesday, March 30, 2021PrintSubscribe
Icons, Icons, Icons

 Material Icons and 3rd Party Icon Fonts

Touch UI gets its good looks from the Material Icons library designed by Google. Apps based on Touch UI feel at home on the Android devices and Chromebooks. They look crisp and professional on iOS, Mac, and Windows.

Touch UI apps support several build-in icon styles and can be extended to use the 3rd party icon collections. 

There are four different styles of icons that help your app to stand out - filled, outlined, rounded, and sharp. The default style filled can be changed by setting the value to ui.theme.icons property in ~/touch-settings.json configuration file. 


The built-in icons come from the web fonts stored under the ~/fonts folder of your application. 

Configuring 3rd Party Icon Fonts

Touch UI makes it easy to integrate additional icon libraries in the application. The following configuration in the ~/touch-settings.json file will set the built-in icon font to the outlined style and link the icon collections called Font Awesome and Material Design Icons. The former offers the popular set of free and commercial icons. The latter is the community-driven effort not affiliated with Google, but bearing a similar name.


Please note that the Font Awesome URL is provided for illustrative purposes only. The vendor requires registration via email. Sign up and you will receive an email with the JavaScript snippet that will hook the web font to your pages. Use the script filename in the ui.iconFonts.fa.url property but keep the “*.css” extension as shown above.

The prefixes “fa” and “mdi” are not accidental. Review the documentation of the web font provider and take a notice of the prefix used in the example. Use the same prefix when registering the font in your app. It is the industry standard to prefix the icon names with the same sequence of characters. The cascading style sheets linked to the app will have the corresponding definitions with the references to the icon font family. 

Touch UI will create dynamic CSS rules at runtime to make the 3rd party icons match the width and height of the built-in icons. Specify a numeric “size” property for the prefix defined in ui.theme.iconFonts if the icons appear to be larger or smaller than the standard icons of Touch UI. The default size of the icons is 24 pixels.

Using Icons in the Application


Let’s apply the standard icon shopping_cart  to the editForm1 view in the Products data controller. Open your app in the Project Designer, find the view, and enter material-icon-shopping-cart in the Tags property.


This will enhance your form with the corresponding icon in the header. The icon is over-imposed on the larger self visible partially in the background for an added artistic touch.


Clear the tag on the view editForm1 and enter the fa-shopping-basket to activate the shopping basket icon from the Font Awesome library.


Here is what happens if you tag the editForm1 view with the mdi-basket and engage the Material Design Icons library.


Assign icons to actions and pages by entering the icon name in their Icon / Custom Style property. For example, icons fa-truck and fa-coffee are assigned to the Shippers page and custom action Take a Break in the screenshots. The icons will show on the sidebar, in the navigation tabs, and in the menu options.


Embedding Icon Fonts in Apps

If you plan to run your app in the native mode or prefer not to have the external dependencies, then consider embedding the stylesheets and fonts directly in the app folders. 

Run the app in the web browser and bring up its Web Inspector. Disable caching on the Network tab and refresh the page. You will find the external references to the CSS stylesheets and the web fonts listed in the traffic. Save them in a dedicated folder under ~/css directory of your app. 

Next remove the “url” property from the prefix under ui.iconFonts in ~/touch-settings.json. Keep the prefix even if it is empty. Run the app and make sure that only the local references appear in the network traffic of the browser. The CSS files will be loaded automatically, but you may need to manipulate the relative references to the web fonts in the CSS files if icons do not show up.

Saturday, March 27, 2021PrintSubscribe
Navigation Menu

Apps created with Touch UI have three options for the placement for the navigation menu. By default the top-level items of the navigation hierarchy are displayed as tabs in the toolbar. Menu items with children will have a dropdown menu. The spill-over items are moved under “More” menu item created automatically as needed.


Developers may choose to move the menu to the sidebar displayed on the left side of the app. The space in the sidebar is at the premium and the complex menus will be collapsed with the current node expanded. The sublevels of the menu can be individually expanded and collapsed. The same collapsible menu is also displayed when the Apps button is pressed. It is also visible in the hamburger menu and on the small screens.


Enter the following in ~/touch-settings.json to move the menu to the sidebar and to relocate the Apps button next to the user profile icon on the toolbar. 


The Apps button is the icon represented with 3 x 3 solid squares or circles. You will find it in the sidebar, on the toolbar, or in the hamburger menu of your app. Its purpose is to provide quick access to the most important pages of the app and to the full navigation menu.

Assign a dedicated icon to a page by entering the icon name in the Icon / Custom Style property of the page in the Project Designer .The  extensive Material Icons library is included with the framework. The name of the icon can be entered with the material-icon- prefix (e.g. material-icon-emoji-people).The icons will be displayed in the sidebar, in the context menu options, and in the drop down menus of the app toolbar. The top-level items will not have the  icons in the menu with the default placement.

Up to five icons are visible in the mini sidebar and the full set is presented in the context panel activated with the Apps button. The More option in the context panel will show the complete navigation menu.


If at least two pages have a dedicated icon, then the app will display the tabs at the bottom of the screen when the sidebar is hidden. The spill-over icons will migrate to the More tab.


The hamburger menu will display the full navigation menu.


Developers may opt to hide the navigation menu from the toolbar and the sidebar by setting ui.menu.location to none in ~/touch-settings.json for a minimalist look and feel. The navigation menu will still be available through the Apps button and the hamburger menu.

The state of nodes in the navigation menu with the vertical layout is controlled by ui.menu.autoExpand property. The default value is current, which will expand one level of the menu node representing the current page. Setting this option to false will keep the current node collapsed. The all value will have all items fully expanded when the navigation menu is rendered vertically.

Touch UI completely automates the navigation menu presentation while letting the developer focus on what’s important.

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