In our application we have a attribute table in which attributes can have different types. At this moment there is a context procedure to switch between fields to display. That makes that the application is not going to work offline.
If it would be possible to say “hide in the form / out of form” in the conditional layout this would not require a context procedure and could also work in offline mode. There are a lot of scenarios in which control procedures and logic would not be needed, while they are needed at this moment. ( The conditional layout is already there so this is just a small addition ).
I do have another idea, to solve the same issue which I will post as a distinct idea.
I note “software factory” below as it should of course work the same in all GUI’s.
Declarative Layout logic
Software Factory
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The Context logic you mention - I’m assuming this refers to Layout logic?
Conditional layout is specifically aimed at styling and highlighting certain records or columns. I wouldn’t want to shoe-horn layout logic into this.
But the general idea is clear - you would like a declarative approach for hiding input fields based on rather straightforward conditions, like the ones used for conditional layout and prefilters.
In essence, declarative Layout logic. If I’ve understood this correctly and you agree with this, I can update the topic title accordingly.
You can rename this if you want.
I think that being able to do common tasks client side could reduce the dependence of context and layout procedures, and with that a lag on the screen of the users.
( at this moment our interface looks slow while the data fetch is fast enough; what happens is that there are a lot of layout and context procedure round trips,. This round trips fetch the record again based on the key. We query for the “Questions we want to ask”, so there is no real key before we have an answer, with the result that the same query is repeated for every round trip to the server ).
We have users with bad internet connections, so, being able to minimize the round trips is quit important for me.
This is one main idea; this way it is possible to send all data needed to make the decision to the user interface with the initial record. It doesn’t cover layout changes based on user input, but it does cover all layout changes based on the environment, and it would also work in offline mode.
I was just thinking… it actually could also cover a lot of user input cases, “If you click yes another input box shows” could be handled easily. In our case that is not the most important thing. We want to be able to show or hide controls based on a field type.