User interface

Owned by Rob Gagne (Unlicensed)
Oct 20, 2012
2 min read

Building a Nexaweb application interface includes designing:

  • Appearance of the application on the page
  • Application navigation
  • Business logic to provide application functionality
  • And optionally, methods for displaying data and methods for obtaining that data to display

UI Appearance and Navigation

To aid you in designing application appearance on the page and application navigation, Nexaweb provides Java and Ajax widget libraries including:

  • Layout panes - componets for arranging components on the page in relation to other components,
  • Structural components in the form of containers such as windows, dialogs and popups
  • Navigational components such as menus and toolbars
  • User interactivity-related components such as text fields, pick lists and buttons
  • Information presentation componets such as labels, tables, tree-tables and forms.

In addition to the widget library, Nexaweb also provides XModify and Xinclude facilities which you can use to modify the UI by adding or removing documents from the UI through the DOM.

To find out more about the Nexaweb Java and Ajax widget libraries see the Nexaweb APIs, the Working with Widgets section of the Develolpers Guide and the Nexaweb Studio Palette view.

Nexaweb also supports setting application formatting styles through the use of stylesheets, .xss stylesheets for Nexaweb Java applications and .css sytlesheets for Nexaweb Ajax applications.

Business Logic

Business logic involves assigning events to various components and creating handlers in the form of MCOs or Macros to implement the events.  

Each component has a set of events associated with it, any of which you can specify as part of the component definition. You create a handler to implement the action of that event and assign the handler to the event.

You create event handlers as MCOs, Java or JavaScript files that execute some set of functionality and can receive and return values related to the event. You can also create event handlers as Macros, sets of XModify instructions.

In addition to event handling, you can create validators to validate user-supplied data.

For more information on business logic, see Key Concepts > Client-side Code > MCOs in this guide; MCO in the Reference API; Events for components in the Reference API; and Business Logic Development and Connecting Business Logic to the User Interface in the Nexaweb Studio User Guide.

Displaying and Obtaining Data

Nexaweb application develoment provides a number of resources for your application to obtain and display data from a webservice or database source.

The Nexaweb Data Framework allows your application to obtain data from a webservice or SQL source and to bind it to a component in your UI for display or editing.

For more information on working with data, see: Data Framework and SOA and Data Services in this guide; Data Service in theReference API; and Accessing Enterprise Data and Using Data Services in the Nexaweb Studio User Guide.