The grid is a nice table that fits well for wide screens like desktop or tablet. However, when showing on smaller mobile device the grid will not fit with more than a few columns. How did you solve this problem in your application?
The table stack pattern sounds promising: https://responsivedesign.is/patterns/data-table-stack/
But how could I implement this with Vaadin Flow? Is there a possibility to exchange the grid with an item list depending on the screen size?
A common approach is to have separate columns for mobile and desktop.
On mobile, or other narrow screens, there might only be one column in a stacking manner. This is quite simple to do with template renders, and a template along the lines of
<div>Name: [[item.name]]</div><div>E-mail: [[item.email]]</div>"
It's even possible to define the template as a Polymer template web component, import it, and set a template renderer like this
<mobile-column item="[[item]]"></mobile-column>
To toggle columns, one can add a resize listener (preferably throttled), e.g. as defined here.
The MediaQuery add-on is also very useful for this. I recommend toggling the visibility on the server, to avoid sending unnecessary data and doing unnecessary rendering in the browser.
I would go with media queries. There is an example here to include them in styles : Media queries in Shadow dom
So, for example, in case width is less than some pre-defined value, set visibility of grid to hidden and list to visible and vice versa, when needed.
Edit: there is also an add-on which might help in using queries : Mediaquery
Related
I've been building my Codename One app for the phone screen format so far. There is a separate Form for the main menu, then a second Form with a list of elements, and then a third Form to edit an element selected from the list. Each Form has an overflow menu and various Titlebar command buttons. And each (Extended) Form has a lot of code that implements the functions in the Form and shares variables etc.
However, to use the tablet (iPad) screen estate, I would like to show the main menu on the left of the screen, the list of elements in the middle and the element edit form on the right. Something similar to the screenshot below. This seems to be a common type of layout on tablets and suits my app usage pattern well.
However, I don't see an elegant way of structuring the code to do this. I can't easily combine the list and edit Forms into one Form, and writing a completely new Form just for the tablet format would be a lot of work. I assume others have faced the same challenge and would love to hear how you achieved this.
PS. I know the side menu can be made permanent but that only solves part of the problem, not how to show a list and edit Forms at the same time.
There is no one answer for this but if you look at apps like Codename One Build you would notice they adapt to this form factor.
We usually just use isTablet() to adapt the UI at key points to the different form factor. One element is the permanent side menu which we turn on in the init method using code like this:
if(Display.getInstance().isTablet()) {
Toolbar.setPermanentSideMenu(true);
}
It makes the side menu stay open all the time. Within the code we try to use Container instead of Form. This allows us to package multiple logical pieces into a single UI for the tablet mode.
I wonder whether I should choose an Ext.Panel with an hbox layout or an Ext.Toolbar in order to put some buttons below a comment input field. Both are suitable for holding a set of controls.
It depends on the required functionality- using a hbox leads to further nesting within your view, so a more complex dom (which typically should be avoided), whereas a toolbar can be applied directly to the parent component. Though both may be suitable for holding a set of controls, toolbars are specifically designed to do so, as such they are a more complex object- again, if you require the functionality they provide (styling, methods etc) then using one should be the choice. Its kind of hard to say based on the limited detail provided
I've got a massive UI that I'm designing. The way that my employer wants it, there are at least 100 labels. Now, I've always thought that in cases like this, breaking up the UI into smaller custom controls was the ideal way to go. However, someone recently told me that custom controls are really only for code re-use. What is the actual suggested practice for this?
EDIT
The finished form will look like this:
Now, I'm using WPF for the UI, and I'm thinking of breaking this down into smaller bits.
Based on your image i see some repetitions, each of this repetitions could be a custom UserControl
But it depends on the usability is it easier to write a custom UserControl so do it but if it would reduce the readability of your code and it also adds additional complexity don't do it
here are an example of what could be separate UserControl's
the green ones are possible useful encapsulations of logic
the orange ones maybe need some not market stuff (don't know enough about your software)
the red ones are the maybe's based on the intern use (from the visual part they are repetitions so the should custom UserControl)
Since your UI is read-only, I'd suggest using a grid.
Are you new to WPF? To break the View into bits WPF offers you CustomControls and UserControls. They are two very similar things yet completely different from each other. CustomControls are Buttons, Labels, TextBoxes, DataGrids...etc. They are basically simple stand-alone controls. UserControls are groups of stand-alone controls serving a purpose such as example a Button and a ComboBox next to each other so user can select something in ComboBox and confirm that by clicking the Button.
If you wish to display data from database I suggest you DataGrid which will give you a table-alike look with rows and columns and all that. If you wish to place few buttons next to DataGrid on which the user may click to insert a new row or to edit a certain cell then I suggest you to wrap all that with a UserControl which you can reuse in other places where you have to display and change data from database too.
You should be using a datagrid and can customize its template to render individual cells as Textblock (lighter version of Label) from a rendering perspective. The main difference between Textblock and Label is very minor things such as access keys and disabled state behavior. But from a WPF object hierarchy - Textblocks are much lighter. But besides that point - from your employer perspective - once you have customized the grid template and render them (so as they look as textblocks/labels) - your employer should have no problems.
Also as somebody suggested above - if you want to logically break sections of the UI since they maybe coming from a different table in db - then User controls is the way to go (for maintainability of code)
Let me know if you are looking for more technical details or need help further technically.
There is nothing wrong in making and using custom controls or user controls or defining some data templates which will be reused depending on how your data is organized.
For sure the UI looks pretty messy and some sort of grid should be used with templates for example where there is similar data. I also have the suggestion and first think about the data and the functionality before starting and let the UI be driven by that. For sure you will the reuse controls/templates. If you think in front on the model and behavior the UI can afterwards more easily changed.
Create your viewmodel correctly, implement the functionality in commands, use bindings, after that the UI will come naturally, reuse controls, use several grids, make the UI more user friendly using several regions, tabs, windows or anything that makes the user more comfortable.
In case a screen of a WPF application contains lots of primitive controls, its rendering becomes sluggish. What are the recommended ways to improve the responsiveness of a WPF application in such a case, apart from adding fewer controls and using more powerful videocard?
Is there a way to somehow use offscreen buffering or something like that?
Our team was faced with problems of rendering performance. In our case we have about 400 transport units and we should render chart of every unit with a lot of details (text labels, special marks, different geometries etc.).
In first our implementations we splitted each chart into primitives and composed whole unit's chart via Binding. It was very sad expirience. UI reaction was extremely slow.
So we decided to create one UI element per each unit, and render chart with DrawingContext. Although this was much better in performance aspect, we spent about one month improving rendering.
Some advices:
Cache everything. Brushes, Colors, Geometries, Formatted Texts, Glyphs. (For example we have two classes: RenderTools and TextCache. Rendering process of each unit addresses to shared instance of both classes. So if two charts have the same text, its preparation is executed just once.)
Freeze Freezable, if you are planning to use it for a long time. Especially geometries. Complex unfreezed geometries execute HitTest extremely slow.
Choose the fastest ways of rendering of each primitive. For example, there is about 6 ways of text rendering, but the fastest is DrawingContext.DrawGlyphs.
Use profiler to discover hot spots. For example, in our project we had geometries cache and rendered appropriate of them on demand. It seemed to be, that no improvements are possible. But one day we thought what if we will render geometries one time and cache ready visuals? In our case such approach happened acceptable. Our unit's chart has just several states. When data of chart is changed, we rebuild DrawingVisual for each state and put them into cache.
Of course, this way needs some investments, it's dull and boring work, but result is awesome.
By the way: when we turned on WPF caching option (you could find link in answers), our app hung up.
I've had the same perf issue with a heavily customized datagrid since one year, and My conclusion is:
there is basically nothing you can do
on your side (without affecting your
app, i.e.: having fewer controls or
using only default styles)
The link mentioned by Jens is great but useless in your case.
The "Optimizing WPF Application Performance" link provided by NVM is almost equally useless in my experience: it just appeals to common sense and I am confident you won't learn anything extraordinary either reading. Except one thing maybe: I must say this link taught me to put as much as I can in my app's resources. Because WPF does not reinstanciate anything you put in resource, it simply reuses the same resource over and over. So put as much as you can in there (styles, brushes, templates, fonts...)
all in all, there is simply no way to make things go faster in WPF just by checking an option or turning off an other. You can just pray MS rework their rendering layer in the near future to optimize it and in the meantime, try to reduce your need for effects, customized controls and so on...
Have a look at the new (.NET 4.0) caching option. (See here.)
I have met a similar problem and want to share my thoughts and founds. The original problem is caused by a virtualized list box that displays about 25 complex controls (a grid with a text block and a few buttons inside displaying some paths )
To research the issue I used the VisualStudio Application Timeline that allows to how much time it takes to render each control and PerfView to find out what actually WPF is doing to render each control.
By default it took about 12ms to render each item. It is rather long if you need to update the list dynamically.
It is difficult to use PerfView to analyse what heppens inside since WPF renders item in the parent-child hierarchy, but I got the common understanding about internall processes.
WPF does following to render each item in the list:
Parse template using XAML reader. As far as I can see the XAML parsing is the biggest issue.
Apply styles
Apply bindings
It does not take a lot of time to apply styles and bindings.
I did following to improve performance:
Each button has its own template and it takes a lot of time to render it. I replaced Buttons with Borders. It takes about 4-5ms to render each item after that.
Move all element settings to styles. About 3ms.
Create a custom item control with a single grid in the template. I create all child elements in code and apply styles using TryFindResources method. About 2ms in the result.
After all these changes, performance looks fine but still most time is spent on loding the ListControl.Item template and the custom control template.
4. The last step: replace a ListControl with Canvas and Scrollbar controls. Now all items are created at runtime and position is calculated manually using the MeasureOverride and ArrangeOverride methods. Now it takes <1ms to render each item from which 0.5ms is spent on TextBlock rendering.
I still use styles and bindings since they do not affect performance a lot when data is changed. You can imagine that this is not a WPF solution. But I fave a few similar lists in the application and it is possible not to use templates at all.
Accordion Layout is stacked panel layout in that only one panel is visible at time but i wanted to show two panel visible at time so can we do this with accordion panel??
You cannot extend the existing Accordion Layout class to achieve what you are looking for. If you go through the source code, you will notice that the Accordion layout is created by extending FitLayout. Now, I quote the property of FitLayout explained in documentation:
This is a base class for layouts that
contain a single item that
automatically expands to fill the
layout's container.
The documentation further says:
If the container has multiple panels,
only the first one will be displayed.
Now, what the questioner is asking for is to display two panels at the same time. Which is simply not possible with any layout extending from FitLayout.
Other Issues:
There are some design issues with the component the questioner is planning to implement;
What about of space will the currently displayed panels take?
How the accordion behavior will work? When user try to access the third panel.. how does the currently open panels behave.
Possible Solution:
Now, one possible solution is to the extend a Panel with vbox layout and have all the panels in it.
It is possible in Ext js 4.1 by using multi property of Accordion layout.
Check the docs here..
I'm sure you can't do it with the existing AccordionLayout.
You could write your own layout class to do it. It's not that hard, the AccordionLayout.js is only few pages long and most of it are comments.
Accordion layout is not designed for that. Choosing according layout for your requirement is like trying to fit sphere in a rectangle.
However, if you put a gun on my head, I quickly think about following options.
Extend existing Accordion class (Discard. Since base is not design for that)
Write your own magic Accordion (Apart from implementation, you have to answer Abdel Olakara mentioned issues, your self)
Mimic the desired behavior, by stacking up two or more Accordions (Well, not a great idea, but gun is on my head).