User Interface / Custom Themes

  Conditional Presentation of Data

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User Interface / Custom ThemesPrint||
Conditional Presentation of Data

Suppose that you need to visually highlight order details with a Unit Price above $30 or a Discount equal to or greater than 15% in the following data view.

Order Details page without any conditional CSS styling.

Start the Project Designer. In the Project Explorer, switch to the Controllers tab, and double-click on OrderDetails / Views / grid1 view node.

'Grid1' view of OrderDetails controller in Project Explorer.

In the left top corner of the Designer window, switch to the Styles tab. On the action bar, select New | New Style option.

Create a new Style on the Styles tab of Project Designer.

Give this style the following properties:

Property Value
Css Class
HighDiscount
Test [Discount]>=.15

Press OK to save. Create another style:

Property Value
Css Class
TooExpensive
Test [UnitPrice]>=30

Press OK to save the style. On the tool bar, press Browse to generate the web application. Navigate to the Order Details page.

We will be using Internet Explorer 9’s Developer Tools. Many other browser have similar tools or add-ons.

On your keyboard, press F12 to access Developer Tools. On the tool bar, click on the Refresh icon and then click on the Arrow icon to enter Inspection mode. Mouse over a row that has a Unit Price above $30 and click on it.

Inspecting a row in the Order Details grid view, you can see that the proper CSS classes have been assigned.

The selected HTML element will be displayed on the HTML tab. You can see that the row has the classes “Row” and “TooExpensive” – we can use this class to assign a style to rows. If you scroll down, you can find rows with the class “HighDiscount” as well.

Switch back to the web application generator, click on the project name, and choose Develop to open the project in Visual Studio. In the Solution Explorer, right-click on ~\App_Themes\MyCompany, and press Add New Item option. If you changed your namespace, add the item in the corresponding folder.

Add New Item to MyCompany folder of the project.

Select Style Sheet item, and press Add to create a new style sheet.

Add a Style Sheet file to the folder.

Replace the default text with the following rules:

tr.TooExpensive td.Cell
{
    background-color:#ffe79c!important;
    border-color:#ffe79c!important;
}

tr.HighDiscount td.Discount
{
    background-image:none!important;
    background-color:#9C0B12!important;
    color:white;
}

tr.TooExpensive.Highlight td.Cell
{
    background-color:#C5C5C5!important;
    border-color:#9E9E9E!important;
}

The first class will change the background color of all Order Details with Unit Price above $30 to yellow. The second class will change the background color of all Discount cells greater than 15% to red. The third class will improve the presentation for selected items.

Save the file, and refresh the web page. You will see that the CSS styles work as planned, and the relevant information is much easier to see at a glance.

Order Details grid view with conditional CSS styling.