WAM085 - Enhancing the User Interface

Objectives

• To demonstrate a number of weblets which enhance the user interface provided by your web page.

• To illustrate standard field visualization weblets, which are automatically added for certain field types.

• To demonstrate some of the properties of these field visualization weblets

To meet these objectives you will complete the following steps:

Step 1. Create Repository Field Definitions

Step 2. Create Employee Number AutoComplete WAM

Step 3. Create WAM iiiEnhancedUI – Enhancing the Interface

Step 4. Define Work Fields and Lists

Step 5. Complete WAM RDMLX

Step 6. Design the web pages

Step 7. Test the WAM

Step 8. Improve the ShowPage Page Design

Step 9. Insert a fieldset around each table

Summary

Before You Begin

You should first complete all preceding exercises in this workshop.

Review the following Field Visualations description.

Field Visualizations

Fields defined in the Repository may also have Field Visualizations defined.

• These visualizations are able to define the field's appearance in Windows desktop applications and / or in web applications built using WAMs.

• Field visualizations for the web are weblets.

• Fields may have a number of visualizations for Windows and web.

• One field visualization, must be defined as the default visualization, which will be the appearance option that is automatically selected.

• For web, just one weblet visualization should be defined, since at design time there is no way to switch between visualizations, except by deleting one and adding another.

• Fields may have a static picklist defined which defines a set of descriptions (or captions) and values. Weblets such as a combo box or radio button group will use this picklist to populate the selection options in the web page.

• Field visualizations are compiled into the web page at design time. A change to the definition of a field's visualization in the Repository, for example changing a radio group to a combo box, or adding or removing entries in the picklist, can only be reflected in the web page by removing that field from the web page and re-adding it. It follows that field visualizations defined in the Repository with a static picklist, are only useful for very static data that is unlikely to ever change, such as "male or female" or "married, single or divorced".

• Note also that field types such as Date, DateTime and String will probably always benefit from having a weblet such as datepicker, so their automatic visualization definitions in the Repository are always useful.

• There are other field visualization options that only apply to Windows desktop applications, that are not described here. For more information, refer to Field Visualization Development in the Visual LANSA Developer Guide.