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.
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I'm very new to Kentico and asp, I'm coming from a php/Wordpress background into this. I'm working on a Page Template that has an optional Carousel in it. I'll need the content of the carousel which I have set as a Document Type, but I'd also like to be able to have a Settings Document type in which they are contained. In the Settings Document Type I want to be able to control what kind of wrapper goes around the whole thing, using a form to do this. I've played around with Hierarchical Transformations, but can't seem to get them to work. At best, I'm able to display markup from the transformation, but the variables set in the Settings Form won't to come through.
Does anyone have any idea as to the best way to get this to work the way I want it to, or is this even possible? I only have access to the CMS and have no access to the file structure or anything like that. I've looked through pages of Kentico documentation, but it seems vague and I can't seem to find any examples of anything close to what I want to achieve.
Update: I've finally somewhat figured out how to make this work with Hierarchical Transformations, but I'm still having an issue with the Opening and Closing Wrappers which I set as Header and Footer Transformations. For some reason these tags appear twice, one within the other. The outer one does exactly what it's supposed to do, but the inner one doesn't take the variables set within the form. Anyone have any idea how I can just display this once?
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 want to create a news application for my website.
My question is how should i create drag-able panels/canvas inside another panel/canvas.
What i exactly intend to do can be seen on netvibes.com . The website has different panels of every news group, and this panel could be moved from one place to other, but in a well defined manner. And the other panel take over the place of dragged panel.
Is there any component in flex, which can help me make something like that.
If i was unable to make my question clear, plz let me know, i will try to make it more clear.
Regards
Zeeshan
A TileList with drag and drop enabled should be able to accomplish something like that. Or, use a Spark List with a custom layout that you create.
It might be a bit tricky getting the list elements to drag and drop based on clicking the title, but it should be doable.
I think you should consider a more advanced solution with drap-n-drop with a custom panel based component. The places the panels can move can be implemented with a different custom canvas based component. The advantage would be to move the components into different custom positions and panels can be resized independent of each other.
Adobe has some good tutorials for drag-drop operations.
I'm in need of some pointing in the right direction here...
I have a site with a couple of different content types. I want to display this content in a book-like layout. The book should be of a fixed width and height and the pages should be populated with as many nodes as can fit. It should be in two columns, with the left column being filled before the right one.
How should i approach this?
I have been thinking about a few solutions, don't know which are possible and which one is best or which i can combine.
I could just create a view that selects more nodes than is need. Then check how long the nodes is in the theming layer and throw away the nodes that aren't needed. Pagers need to be fixed too.
Use panels in combination with views to display one view in two columns, if this is possible. Need a way to determine the amount of nodes that is displayed on each page, based on content length.
Write a plugin/handler for views so that i can select an amount of nodes that has an maximum, predetermined, max content length.
Write a new display-style for views that shows content in two columns with fixed heights.
Write a custom module, leave views and panels out of it and do everything myself with db_queries.
Would appreciate and guidance a lot. Not looking for a finished solution, i'm not afraid to code and i will contribute back if i create something that someone else can use (like a views plugin). Just need someone to guide me in the right direction :)
The hardest thing will be to figure out how much content you need to fill out the space. There's not really a good way to do that either since, it will depend on both the markup and the styles.
The best solution I can think of is loading the nodes with javascript, or maybe just have them available as javascript variables. That way you could insert the nodes to your page one by one. You could then in the JS see the heights of all the nodes in total, and once that height is bigger than x, you only need to remove the last inserted node.
It's not a perfect solution, but I think you should look at doing this with JavaScript. The only problem is, that it wont degrade gracefully very well.
Drupal help you build fast, and it looks like promising but fails to fullfil the needs of client, designer also programmer. You need to write one module page, and some functions.
5th solution you gave has little trouble than others. Write a function that to have "teaser like" behavior, I will return formatted node according to its type. Don't lay on drupal's teaser system. If teasers will have different heights, add height to teaser function.
I don't have a direct answer, but have a few things for you to think about.
It sounds to me like what you are looking for is a combination of a CSS3 Multicolumn Layout (see http://www.quirksmode.org/css/multicolumn.html for example) and limiting the displayed content to a fixed height.
My first thought would be to create a single view that gets more than you need, display it using CSS3 columns, and set overflow: hidden; for the container, so that the extra text is just hidden.
If you need to get more particular, you may need to dig in to the views rendering system to limit the total number of nodes based on how many characters have been rendered.
But since your desired constraint is more visual than data-oriented, I think that the most practical approach will be to use javascript to detect the text height and state of overflow.
There are some things that are unclear about your requirements. What is the purpose of the 2 content types? Does one display on the left and the other on the right? Or are these just 2 different content types that should behave the same way, but we're only seeing one content type at a time on a given page? What should happen with the overflowed content? Should it appear dynamically on page 2, then 3, then 4, and so on?
One parting thought: Maybe load ALL the content that you want to page through, directly to the browser. Maybe have it start off hidden. Then use javascript to display it, formatted into columns, and use javascript to handle the paging as well.
Ok I had asked a question recently based on this.
But I need to narrow down more..
I need to create a network graph with nodes in flex. Once I give the input the nodes must get connected with each other if they have something in common.
The nodes must be click-able to show which other nodes it is connected to.
A simple code example will be appreciated.
Can a bubble chart be modified to do this?
Thanks
I think you can try Flare.
Take a look at the demo for Layout.
i personally think, a bubble chart is not really the right way to go ...
most simple thing - in a flex world - would be to subclass UIComponent twice, for, let's say, NodeView and ConnectionView, and then put all this into some container, with absolute positioning ...
other way would be to simply add a Sprite to a UIComponent, and do the same thing in plain AS3, simply subclassing Sprite twice ... less overhead and other problems, but will not benefit from flex features, such as styling ...
do you already have a model for the network? do nodes also have coordinates, or do you need to arrange them your self?
or, if loaded externally, can you show some sample data?
greetz
back2dos