The Project that I am currently handling is for the world’s most important banks’ and it’s a nice piece of complete integration between an existing intranet portal application and a webdynpro application without enterprise portal framework.
Our initial challenges included a tight integration between the portal environment and the webdynpro application, which we successfully managed to show case the navigation (DATA) transfer between them. However the trouble started only during the UI design of the webdynpro application.
We were given story board developed in HTML that needs to be developed in the webdynpro application and it had the best of complexities of the HTML framework. The main criteria included the look and feel of the webdynpro application must strictly be same as that of the existing portal application. We got down to work and made certain good amount of analysis and came out with certain IMPOSSIBILITIES (atleast from the current version), which made the client bewildered and started taking up serious thoughts.
However, we pulled back with a much more flexible UI design and now the project is in the development rolling stage.
At this juncture, we felt the need to bring in our difficulties on the UI design to the Net weaver community, though we tend to put in all our issues, we felt the critical issue was on the usage of table element in webdynpro UI, that is badly or most often utilized in the web environment.
Hence please find below the limitations (We expect these to be closed chapters in next release) of the webdynpro UI &# element -TABLE
1) Single Column having two elements in the same row and display them together
2) Column heading in two rows – wrapping the caption and showing them in two lines
3) Column sub headings,-grouping of some 3-5 columns and showing under one same heading
4) Moving the column lines and row lines (borders) to increase the width / size and get to read the contents of the cell with more clarity.
5) Row span for the corresponding column span together or individually will help in displaying large amount of data with much ease.
6) Provision of background colors for individual cells within a table for easier identification and user understanding, so that important messages and errors can be displayed
7) Automatic wrapping and default multiple row selection for (deletion or modification)
Thus there are other constraints also in developing the table layout from the webdynpro UI. Similar to that, the various limitations, like context sensitive navigations(mouse right click), Shortcuts / Accelerator Keys, Time Picker, Scrollable Tab strips, Formatted Text View, Custom UI controls, etc which we hope shall be addressed in near future.
In conclusion this document is just a top level perspective of limitations found during the initial stages. The need to move along and provide the input to the webdynpro community the various possibilities in developing robust applications
More to follow would be the best of webdynpro that we have seen. So keep watching & coding!!!
This Blog is a follow up of Armin's UI Polling, that we intend to bring it to the blog area also, so that the chances of getting the required information is more, please check out the forum also for more information.
