We are interested in moving an application to servoy. I read the developers guide and made some small examples to get an idea of how applications are build in servoy.
Our application contains many views/forms. But they all are built similar: On top they have a main menu bar. On the left a navigation bar (changing according to the main topic selected) and on the right a detail form.
What should I do in servoy to get sort of one ore more “templates” for my views/forms (or, you may call it a gui-framework)? Should I use modules to avoid building all my views from scratch each time? How do I avoid to change all views if a detail, e.g. the position of a drop down list in the navigation bar, used in all views, changes?
I’d suggest that you look at “tabless tabpanels”. Tabpanels represents a “form in a form” (aka subform), and allow you to have your menu bar be created in one place, and be used in many other places. This allows you to have lots of reuseable GUI elements.
Thank you for your answer. Finally I gave it a try and used the tabless tabpanel. It really seem to fulfil my requirement.
On the other hand two new questions did raise now:
Let’s assume I define a menu bar (as you suggested) and use this bar in an other form in a tabpanel. Now I run the application and call a method in this menu bar. In which context is this code avaluated? Normally the current window will be affected. But the menu bar does not know anything about its use.
I tried to define an “interface”: I defined a label in a form. And I defined a method to set the text of the label. Then I used the form in another form within a tabpanel. When opening the second form I tried to call the method. But the form with the label seems to be hidden to me. I could’t “reach” the method (or the label) in the editor from a method in the second form.