Friday 4 July 2014

Pull to Refresh Control

  For mobile platforms, a common user interaction to refresh a list of data is to pull down from the top of the listbox. 

The next release of Rapide will support a "Pull to Refresh" action for listboxes and row templates. When the user pulls down from the top of the listbox, a specified event is triggered in the procedure step and a message plus spinning icon informs them that the data is being refreshed.



Thursday 3 July 2014

Paged Navigation

The next release of Rapide will support an enhanced style of navigation called Paged Navigation.

This style is very common on mobile devices, with the example below shows the navigation between four pages. Notice how the top banner of the page indicates the current page title and also has a button to return. 




The runtime automatically keeps track of the previous page without the need for any additional code to process the return flow to the previous page when the user presses the back button. 

The behaviour is customised to the standard behaviour of each platform by using native controllers for each platform.

On iOS Paged Navigation is implemented using a View Controller and a Navigation Bar to display the page title and back button. In addition you can include toolbar buttons onto the Navigation Bar (top) or Navigation toolbar (bottom) by simply defining a toolbar in the Gen window design.

Similarly on Android a native ActionBar control is used where the system back button returns to the previous page and the navigation bar back button to the top page.

Wednesday 2 July 2014

Rapide Paginator Control

The next release of Rapide sees the introduction of a new widget - the Paginator control.

The Paginator can be used to control navigation between pages for a grid/row template listbox and also for an entire window or primary dialog box.

For a listbox, you simply specify that the Paginator control is to be used and the Rapide runtime will automatically populate the control with the number of pages and the current page indicator.

For a primary window/dialog box, you can specify the placement of the control and bind it to two numeric views - one that specifies the number of pages and the second the current page.

When the user swipes between pages, an event is called in the procedure step and the designer can decide how to process the page change event, for example by changing the data displayed.

In the example below, the user can swipe between different products, with the Paginator control at the bottom giving them a visual indicator of how many products are available.