I am looking for some advice in regards to getting a very quick display of our reports. The problem I am working with is I receive an XML data structure that defines our layout. The report can be anywhere from 2 to 3 pages to perhaps 20 to 30. So to make the report display as quickly as possible I would like to just render the visible portion of the report. Here are the issues I need to overcome to accomplish this and I am looking for some advice how how to accomplish this.
To get a better visualization, Think of this like a word document. The reports have sections and I want to be able to get them to display as quickly as possible.
1) Of course I do not know the height of the child components I will be adding. Is there any techniques where I can determine if the components I am adding are not include in the view port and could I trigger off scroll bar movement.
2) I was thinking of adding estimation to the children components and then using that to set the height of the parent container. then when I receive scroll bar move event, I would check if the child components have been added to the parent and if not add them. Is there anyway to get the height of a component without rendering it?
3) Does Flex support anything built in that will accomplish this.
Any other techniques would be welcome. Basically I want to get the report displayed to the user as quickly as possible and delay the rendering of components that are off the screen.
Any suggestions would be welcomed. Thanks in advance.
Added Info.
Hard to provide code since I have not coded it yet. Let me try and expand with some details. I have a Parent Container where I take the some XML and using the XML creating children components based on the information in the XML. Right now when we do this it can take a long time to render a long report. What I want to do is to reduce the rendering time by delaying the rendering of those children objects. I have looked into things like the creation policy and createDeferredContent, but not sure if this is the right way to go. Guess the general problem I need to attack is how to do you stop rendering objects once you are outside the parents viewport. What I want is an item renderer like functionality but there is no similarity between the children. Perhaps a picture might be useful (will add as soon as I get to 10 points)?
Use spark List with useVirtualLayout turned on. This is what it does.
There is always similarity between children, but if you can't find it, you can use an itemRendererFunction.
With VS 2003 we were used to desing the web forms quite similarly to win forms: the Textboxes, Labes, Buttons etc. were positioned with absolute coordinates (inline css) in divs with ms_positioning="GridLayout".
With VS 2010 this way of designing web forms seems to be gone (at least it can no more be used to get the design finished quickly) and the use of absolute coordinates and inline css is considered obsolete anyway.
I would like to get some hints how to design web forms like the one in sample screenshot the "correct" way.
I would like to preserve following important things:
One should be able to quickly / easily add, remove or move the form's controls while maintaining the overall look and feel of the form - our web forms tend to change / grow over time as customers' requirements change.
The form should not crumple together when the user reduces the width of the browser window - the form width should not descend under some minimal value.
I am considering using html tables, but for example for the Address-Block on the sample screenshot I would have to have a table with 9 columns (one for every vertical boundary) and use lots of colspans - not neccessarily the fastest way of designing the forms considering future changes. And I heard in 1999 or so that the html tables were obsolete.
I read I should use divs and css for pretty much everything but I am unclear in how to create a web form like the one on the sample screenshot without providing absolute positions and sizes some way or other.
Any hints will be greatly appreciated.
Thanks in advance
Best Regards
Erich Horak
I would divide up your three main sections into divs, then tackle each section individually. My main tool when approaching this is the Web Dev Toolbar. I use it to view markup and CSS of any form I locate online that I like the look of:
https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/web-developer/
(CSS -> View CSS and CSS -> View Style Information (hover mouse) are helpful drop down options)
Forms are created with CSS mainly through the use of label and input classes:
http://speckyboy.com/2011/05/24/css-form-templates-tools-services/
Your form looks difficult at first glance, but when you break it down it really isn't that hard to do. The link above has samples - simple like you mentioned - but simple or not, the CSS is the same.
I'm using Drupal 7.2 core and I'd like to display similar (just by title) node links under every node. I know that there's a lots of modules to do that, but they use some kind of tags or other serious stuff and I'd like just to compare titles of nodes. If they're somehow similar put the link in the block. But... how? Or maybe I should use some module but what are these tags, how can I set them automatically to all nodes?
Ok. I did it.
It wasn't so hard to add taxonomy tags to nodes and make them specified by nodes author. Then I used Relevant Content module which creates a block with nodes relevant content in it by the nodes taxonomy criteria. And it works like a charm!
Thanks to everyone who viewed this question
I have created an organizational chart using ASP.NET on web page. The web page is using strict DOCTYPE and following W3C standards.
The chart has a hierarchical layout decided by the manager field in the table that contains employees in the organization.
The chart layout has nodes with employee image and other details like job title, department and contact details. Nodes are beautifully arranged and connected by lines (only horizontal or vertical or both).
A lot of DIV elements are used (to avoid table) for connecting lines and arranging the chart properly. As suggested by my friend, using DIVs for connecting lines in the chart is semantically wrong. Also, a lot of DIVs are used to arrange the chart.
Is there a way by which I can make it semantically correct? Or, am I using HTML for the wrong purpose?
It looks like you're using HTML for something you shouldn't. Having said that,DIVs are supposed to be for division (sections) of the document. If each node is conceptually a unit, then a DIV is probably appropriate. If the nodes are not a unit, you may want to use a SPAN instead.
While reviewing the tutorials and example Flex projects, they seem to focus mainly on form elements and data grids, rather than delivering content in a more visual way. Which is what I will need for this upcoming project. As a result, I have a gap in my comfort level that I'm hoping that a seasoned Flex developer can help me hurtle.
The project that I have is a collaboration index tool to display customers products and services using an user interface with four separate panels.
the top-left panel will contain a list of categories in a vertical scroll.
The bottom left panel will contain a wheel effect of sub-categories, based on the category chosen.
The top right panel will contain the detail information - The selected Category Title and Description. And below that, the selected sub-category title and description.
The bottom right panel will contain a list of the service and product items that belong to the sub-category. Below each item in the list will be a link-group accordion with url links for more information in each.
There will be an XML file containing the complete data tree driving this collaboration index.
Additionally, depending on the category chosen, color variances will occur in the background of the some of layout sections.
So, It appears that I will need to create a few custom components, maybe adopt a few existing components, and re-skin everything so that it carries a synonymous look and feel to the client's branding.
Although I have a bunch of questions, tackling the first section seems logical, and the first question that comes to mind in this section is: in the top left panel, should the list of categories be standard Flex buttons that are re-skinned? or should they be object instances somehow brought in to Flex.
Then in the second section, I was had seen a component that displayed images in a way that was perfect for this section. But, the items show here would be just visual, rounded corner blocks with subcategory names in them. So, I'm not sure if that component will work or not.
AS3 is very different from AS2. I'm sure you've noticed by now, but it's worth mentioning in case you hadn't.
Flex Components are basically just a package of Flash objects. So you can, sort of, write every Flex component on your own using just Sprites and/or TextFields. This includes skins. A skin is pretty much just a Shape attached to an object with custom drawing.
A button is just a combination of image+textField+skin, with all the events and skin transitions managed for you.
The reason I mention this is that there is no right way to do what you want. If you're using the List control, you should probably write a component that implements IListItemRenderer. Button does, so you can simply override the Button, no problems. You can have buttons with a label + icon. Or just icon. Or just a label. You can also define where the label is positioned relative to the icon (labelPosition="above|below|left|right"). There is a lot of built-in flexibility.
Thanks for the mention of FlexSpaces. Note that it was finally ported to Flex 4 including a first pass conversion to spark controls earlier this year. Still to do: add dependency injection with Spring ActionScript, remove use of Cairngorm 2.x.
I have been developing Flex 4 quite heavily the past 6 months and must say it would make your job very easy.
Here's what I would do:
1) Check out FlexSpaces for the best Flex 3 project architecture. It's a fully featured CMS in Flex with categories, tags, searching, filesystem, collaboration, etc.
2) Download the Flex 4 SDK and install that. There's no need to use Flex 3 anymore, if you're just getting started, DEFINITELY go with Flex 4. If you need custom components, Spark (the new component architecture) has a very simple way of doing them (here's a cool blog post building a Rating Component in Spark that shows you how do it). Flex 4 is backward compatible with Flex 3 components, so you can use projects/components you find on the internet if you want to, no problem.
3) For the top-left category list, if the categories aren't nested, I would use the spark.components.List, (here's one using more complex item renderers). Then just extend the spark.components.supportClasses.ItemRenderer, which acts just like a Skin. If categories are nested, just use the mx.controls.Tree. Check out that FlexSpaces project for that (they show how to use XML/ArrayCollections in the tree, your "object instances brought into flex somehow" question).
4) For the wheel effect, the only thing I don't like about Spark so far is that it's difficult to animate layouts. But people are starting to make 3D layouts, check out Here's 5 3D Layouts for Flex 4 by Ryan Campbell. There's also OpenFlux if you want very easily animated layouts. Flex effects in general are quite clunky, so I end up just using Tweener or TweenMax for animations.
5) As for reskinning, trying to reskin using the Flex 3 architecture would be a monumental task, if you wanted to make it look clean and nice, and it would be insane trying to reuse that code in the next project. For Spark, it's a snap, and it's 100% mxml. Just copy the whole sparkSkins folder from the SDK and start changing things, and you're good to go.
But yeah, that FlexSpaces project is a very solid example for what you're talking about. Totally open source.
Cheers