DHTML Prototype Navigation

Hi Fraser,

The page navigator is scheduled in V3.0 (which should be available at the end of year 2011). Although it is not very convenient, you could make use of some selectable elements (such as list, table, tree, menu bar etc) and the “Go to Page” action to create your own page navigator. By placing your own page navigator into a master page, all your pages can share the same navigator.

Meanwhile you can use PageUp/PageDown to rapidly switch pages.

For sure you can have your own window to pop up, and it is not difficult to do so. You can read this article first: http://www.foreui.com/doc/html/simula…

You can also take a look at the “Timer.4ui” example (included in your installation) and this one: http://www.foreui.net/node/92. However, these simulated popup windows are not in modal mode. If you need a model window, you would need to use an invisible element to cover the entire background.

Hi Xavier,

Thank you for the response. I’ll look into the page navigator idea, and into the popup menu. The popup window sounds exactly what we’re looking for.

The tree navigation (or a suitable alternative) is really a must-have for us. Our application, and therefore our specification, has several hundred UIs in it, therefore PageUp/PageDown just won’t work out.

The tree navigation in our current tool is dynamic, repopulating automatically each time our specification is published. Another good feature of that tool is the ability to republish a single UI rather than having to rebuild the entire specification (plot I suppose in ForeUI speak). I’m in no position to say how long several hundred UIs would take to build in ForeUI but it seems likely that the ability to republish a single UI would be a benefit. These would be great things to see in ForeUI too.

Depending on the outcome of your page navigator suggestion i’d be extremely keen to migrate to ForeUI asap. If that’s not so successful we may have to wait until V3.0.

Thank you again,

Fraser.

Considering the page navigation is quite important for prototype review. We decide to make some enhancements on current facilities in next update, and provide a “Page Navigator” custom element at that time.

We released V2.80 today, and you can find the “Page Navigator” element via the “Resource Sharing” button, or you can get it from http://www.foreui.net/node/94

Hi Xavier,

I’ve had a play around with the page navigator element. It looks good, however i’m still concerned that it won’t work for us given the number of interfaces we have in our specification.

There are several reasons for that (some of which may be solvable):

1. The page navigator doesn’t take account of page hierarchy, and it needs to.

2. It doesn’t sort correctly, which is a big problem when you refer to interfaces by an ID, which in my experience most people do (it goes IID1, IID11, IID2 etc).

3. It loads a massive list in a table, which means the user has the scroll waaay down to get to a UI at the bottom of the list.

If it was possible to populate a tree view control using the page hierarchy as defined in the plot, and of course making the items link to the UI, then we could make this work for us, but sadly not at the moment.

It may be that what we want to do is not where you want to take the product, but it’s such a superb tool that it would be a real shame to have to pass it by. It may be worth downloading a trial of RP Pro to see how they handle their HTML prototype. It’s far from ideal (no search for example) but it represents the minimum level of functionality that we can accept.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Fraser McMillan.

Hi Xavier,

I’ve had a play around with the page navigator element. It looks good, however i’m still concerned that it won’t work for us given the number of interfaces we have in our specification.

There are several reasons for that (some of which may be solvable):

1. The page navigator doesn’t take account of page hierarchy, and it needs to.

2. It doesn’t sort correctly, which is a big problem when you refer to interfaces by an ID, which in my experience most people do (it goes IID1, IID11, IID2 etc).

3. It loads a massive list in a table, which means the user has the scroll waaay down to get to a UI at the bottom of the list.

If it was possible to populate a tree view control using the page hierarchy as defined in the plot, and of course making the items link to the UI, then we could make this work for us, but sadly not at the moment.

It may be that what we want to do is not where you want to take the product, but it’s such a superb tool that it would be a real shame to have to pass it by. It may be worth downloading a trial of RP Pro to see how they handle their HTML prototype. It’s far from ideal (no search for example) but it represents the minimum level of functionality that we can accept.

Looking forward to hearing from you,

Fraser McMillan.

Hi Fraser,

The current page navigator element is just a custom element, which is consist of some rectangle, button, text box and table elements. Its behavior is limited by the facilities provided by ForeUI. It could not implement the page hierarchy because the tree element does not support dynamically adding nodes yet.

The current page navigator does not sort the pages at all. The pages are listed in the same order in the page management window.

From your description I realize your plot is quite big, so the long page list would be annoying. However that’s what we could do before V3.0 (3.0 will have page navigation in simulation framework). Thanks for comprehension.