I am developing as site for mobile devices which requires the user to select a product (there are ~70 in total). I however do not have a testing device with me at the moment (I am also currently on a Mac and do not know of any mobile browser emulators for Macs).
My question is, would a drop down list of length ~70 be way too long? How hard would it be for a user to select an option from it (assuming there is nothing else on the page)? For the sake of argument, how hard would it be to navigate it on the iPhone and the BlackBerry (those are the two most important browsers for me at the moment)?
I would rather not split up the list for the sake of simplicity but I guess I can if necessary. Does anyone have any better ideas for splitting up the list/displaying the form on a mobile device?
For some insight into why I want a drop down list like this, it is so that users can select 2 products (two lists) and the site will return whether or not they are compatible with each other.
I've had this issue with trying to present country codes or airports in mobile web apps. It does work just fine (especially on iPhone & BB), but you should do as much as you can to make the selection easier. We did things like
Place the nearest airports (geographically) at top of the list
Remember last selection
Configure a short list of the most selected products and have these at top of list
This suggestions are based on the context of what the user is trying to do on our webapp. You will have different context with your own optimisations hopefully.
One suggestion for you is to switch your UI from two drop lists to two pages - on the first page display all the products as HTML links. When the user selects a product, navigate to the second page, but you can now populate that only page with products that are compatible with the product selected on the first page. Have a look at http://m.jetstar.com, go to the Booking Process and see how you selecte departure/arrival airports. It might work for you?
BTW - try http://www.iphonetester.com to get a sense of what your website will look like in the iPhone form factor.
Good luck!
Related
I have a list created for the purpose of displaying news. So, the columns are: Title, Content and Created. For example, I'd like the list to let people know when there is a server outage planned.
What I want for the functionality of the web part is to display the title only and only the month/day the news item created in the list. I'd like a picture of a small arrow in the front of the items also (left side).
Example:
"
News Web Part
=> Server outage planned for this Saturday (06/23)
=> Server updates today (06/22)
"
I would like the user to be able to click on the titles of these items and it will go to a page that gives more information (Content column, rich text), instead of pop that AJAX window like what happens by default when you click on a list item.
Does this require Visual Studio? If not, is something like this possible?
Thank you!
I would recommend making a list to store the information that you want to provide to the end user via the SharePoint UI. Once you have your list create a view, Order it by most recently created and limit the number of items displayed to as many as you wish to display to the user.
Add a list web part(XSLTListViewWebPart) and point that at a view you have created.
This will give you something pretty basic visually.
You will then need to look in to XSLT to apply a style to that web part. There are loads of articles on google of how to do this.
You do not need to do this in visual studio, I sometimes just use notepad ++ for small things like this. The above should be enough for you to get started.
Cheers
Truez
I'm using ExpressionEngine's multisite manager and I'm displaying channel entries from two of the sites - our global site and our localized site for our Australia office. For the Australia site I would like to display all channel entries, but from the Global Site channel entries I would like to only display channel entries from a particular category (in this case "25" ie. those tagged as pertaining to Australia on our Global site).
If I use something like this below, it wont show the any of the entries from the Australia site (tpi_au) because I don't have those categorize.
{exp:channel:entries channel="success" dynamic="no" site="tpi_hq|tpi_au" category="25"}
Is there a way to make that category="25" apply only to tpi_hq?
Sorry this is probably a really easy answer or I'm just doing something totally wrong to begin with... :/
Thank you!
I don't believe there is a way to do this directly in a single channel call.
Situations like this arise all the time, not just with MSM. What if you want 10 entries for category X and 7 entries from category Y? Same deal.
Basically you need to make two channel:entries calls.
If you don't care about the order of the entries you are done. If it bothers you that the tpi_hq entries are always at the top of the list while the tpi_au entry is always at the bottom then you need to figure a way to sort them.
Two approaches I've used for this:
Sort the entries on the client side. I've done this in jQuery using html5 data-date parameters on <li>s.
Muck around with passing forward the entry ID's as embed variables. This requires a total of 3 EE channel:entry tags plus an embed so it is definitely less efficient on the server side, if you are concerned about such things.
Incidentally, most of the EE questions are now handled in the EE SE. You might get a different/better answer over there.
I am kind of new to SharePoint. I am learning it on the go and learned about the concept of pagelayout and publishing features on the site. But I am not really 100% sure what is the difference between a WebPartPage, SitePage and PublishingPage. I kind of know what all these pages be used for, but what I not get is: why do they need to separate all these pages?
I think we can just get a publishing page and have all the feature there including webpart and everything else (with our choice of PageLayout). However I dont see a way to use a pagelayout on a particular SitePage.
Is there any particular reasons for using either one of them? Even though it seems like one of them can serve as all of them?
You should use page layout when ever you know the page structure. For example you are running an online news paper. You want to show the news to the users into three columns. First column is for menu, second column is for news content and third column is for advertisements. Now in your daily usage this layout is common. So you can use this page layout for entering the news. After creating the page layout you can make it as a default to your pages. Page layout is nothing but the structure of a page simply!!
A webpart page does not have a field for content directly on the page like a SitePage has. A Publishing Page is like a SitePage, but requires extra fields for dealing with the publishing extra features.
Using a single layout for all three risks being confused as to why one page does not work the same as another when it has the same layout (the difference would be the underlying features are different.).
I will make a comparison with cars. There are three type of cars, each is better suitable for a certain purpose: tractors for farming, buses for public transport, light cars for private transport. You could use a tractor for all the purposes above but it's not ideal.
"One of them can serve as all of them". This is not true in their current implementation. I'll give you one example: prefer Web part pages against Publishing pages to better control content added by contributors in an intranet. There are many other examples.
I've got a tricky situation I'm trying to determine the best way to solve. I'm a VS developer who is learning SharePoint so it's a little frustrating to me when what I am trying to accomplish could easily be done with code and a db.
I have three lists, a parent and two children list that are linked through lookup columns. The client actually wanted everything in one list but due to SharePoint column type limitations I had to split the data into the three lists, there are over 300 fields. The client wants to see all the lists together in one view and be able to filter and edit groups of items.
I have successfully created a new data source linking the lists and can display that on one of my pages to view. After some research however I have learned that I can't create a datasheet view from this linked view due to limitations in the Office componets that SP uses. Which makes sense.
The business need is for the client to filter the three lists based on criteria they select from either list A AND list B and list C to get a group of items, they make the updates and save the changes back to the 3 lists. They prefer to do this in datasheet view because this mimics the excel spreadsheet that they are currently using that this website will replace. They will potentially be updating between 1-30 items at a time using this, which is why they prefer the drag and copy functionality.
I was thinking of two options: trying to create some kind of custom web part that has a gridview of all the columns in edit mode that they can filter down to their items and make their changes. Then I would have to loop through the fields and make updates programmatically. I also saw on this site jQuery.sheet, that looks like it may be a good solution if I go this route instead of gridview.
Or have a modal window with the columns listed, have the user select what they want to filter to, then redirect to a page that shows the three lists in their own DSVs. The user would have to make updates in the three separate views. Then I would use workflows to synchronize the lists after they had made their changes.
I always end up trying to do things programmatically since I am still largely unfamiliar with SP and only seem to hit its limitations instead of its strengths. Has anyone tried to do something similar to this? Or do you have any suggestions as to the best way to accomplish this? Best practices? I appreciate all thoughts and comments! FYI I've also posted this on the MS SP forums as well to cast a wider net...
Thanks,
Sabrina
In this case, you are better off going with a custom solution. A webpart would be an excellent choice for delivering your custom interface.
A dataview webpart will do the job, but if you feel comfortable with the jQuery solution it would make for a nicer interface.
In your code, treat the lists as you would a database and isolate it from the logic and interface code within the webpart.
This should be a really really simple thing, but for some reason it is just eluding me.
I want a Sharepoint page which will have a drop down list that is tied to a database lookup table.
When an item is selected and they click a GO button, I want it to update a gridview that is also on the page.
I'm looking for a simple how to - while assuming I'm a sharepoint idiot. BTW, I am using the Microsoft Office Sharepoint Designer.
Thanks,
Edit:
My need is actually very simple. I want to filter the results of a query using a drop down list. This used to be called a master - detail relationship.
For example, my regular data has school name, application name, and how long the application was running. Because there could be a hundred applications per school and there are 60+ schools, I only want to show one schools information at a time.
So, I want to put a drop down list at the top of the screen which contains the list of schools. When one is selected, the gridview should be updated to reflect the new schools information.
Chris.
I currently use a drop down tied to one sharepoint list to filter a dataview of another sharepoint List.
The instructions are here:
http://blogs.msdn.com/sharepointdesigner/archive/2007/03/05/asp-net-controls-filter-the-data-view.aspx
I'm not exactly sure of the specific needs here, but it seems that you are trying to stretch a bit beyond what Sharepoint Designer is well suited to. To look up data, you do have access via the dataview web part, which is here:
http://office.microsoft.com/en-us/sharepointdesigner/HA100948041033.aspx
However your filtering needs may prevent you from using this. If you want to do it .net without knowing too much about MOSS, you can use the "son of smartpart" (google it) which allows you to host standard .net user controls in webparts.
Hope this helps!