wp7: navigating dynamic pivotitems in a pivot - windows-phone-7

I have a pivot page, with one fixed pivotitem, and depending on data, a dynamic number of additional pivotitems. The fixed pivotitem keeps a hyperlink list of the new pivotitems created, and the idea is to click any of the links and navigate to that pivotitem.
It would look something like this:
FixedItem | DynamicItem1 | DynamicItem2
link: DynamicItem1
link: DynamicItem2
The problem I am facing is with the hyperlink click, it doesn't take me to the respective pivotitem, but instead takes me to the pivot page with no dynamic pivotitems. I am using the following code for navigation:
hyperlink.NavigateUri = new Uri("/MainPage.xaml?name=" + p.name, UriKind.Relative);
where p.name is the name of the pivotitem. I am not sure if this is the right syntax, but what's confusing is that all the created pivotitems get lost, leaving only the fixeditem - as if it was opening a new instance of the pivot page.
Then, in the OnNavigatedTo I tried the following:
if (NavigationContext.QueryString.ContainsKey("name"))
{
// URI is '/page?name=PivotItemToSelect'.
string selectedPivotItem = e.Uri.Query.Split('=').Last();
// Match PivotItemToSelect with the PivotItem's Name.
PivotItem pivotItemToShow = pivot.Items.Cast<PivotItem>().Single(i => i.Name == selectedPivotItem);
pivot.SelectedItem = pivotItemToShow;
base.OnNavigatedTo(e);
}
On the first line, I get an exception that this operation cannot be done on a "relative" URI. Any other way I could that information?
If I change the pivotitem name to a number, say i, and pass that i as the index, I got the following code to work as the _click method of the hyperlinkbutton - but in real usage the name will most likely be a text string:
pivot.SelectedIndex = int.Parse(i);
I am not sure how totally off the track I am, and would appreciate any pointers in the right direction.
Thanks.

The correct way to access the QueryString in your OnNavigatedTo event is like this:
string selectedPivotItem = this.NavigationContext.QueryString["name"];
Using a Pivot control for your navigation like this seems very strange, but since I know nothing about the context of your app, I'll assume you have chosen it for a reason.
If you are designing an app with a dynamic list of items to navigate to, it would be better to have a single page for your link list and a single detail page that can use the query string to bind to the specific object you are wanting. This will perform better and make more sense to your users. But again, I don't know the context of your app or your reasoning, so that's up to you! :)

Related

Link directly to a notebook page in a view

I have an view that extends the current project view, where we add multiple tabs (notebook pages) to show information from other parts of a project.
One of these pages is an overview page that summarizes what is under the other tabs, and I'd like to link the headlines for each section directly to each displayed page. I've currently solved this by using the index of each tab and calling bootstrap's .tab('show') method on the link within the tab:
$(".overview-link").click(function (e) {
e.preventDefault();
var sel = '.nav-tabs a:eq(' + $(this).data('tab-index') + ')';
$(sel).tab('show');
});
This works since I've attached a data-tab-index="<int>" to each header link in my widget code, but it's brittle - if someone adds a tab later, the current indices will be broken. Earlier I relied on the anchor on each tab, but that broke as well (and would probably break if a new notebook page were inserted as well).
Triggering a web client redirect / form link directly works, but I want to show a specific page in the view:
this.do_action({
type: 'ir.actions.act_window',
res_model: 'my.model.name',
res_id: 'my.object.id',
view_mode: 'form',
view_type: 'form',
views: [[false, 'form']],
target: 'current'
});
Is there any way to link / redirect the web client directly to a specific notebook page tab through the do_action method or similar on FormWidget?
If I understood well you want to select the tab from the JavaScript (jQuery) FormWidget taking into account that the id could change if anybody install another module that adds another tab
Solution 0
You can add a class to the page in the xml form view. You can use the id of the element selected by this class name in order to call the right anchor and select the right tab item. This should happen when the page is completely loaded:
<page class="nb_page_to_select">
$('a[href=#' + $('.nb_page_to_select').attr('id') + ']').click()
NOTE: As you have said the following paragrah I assume that you know where to run this instruction. The solution I suggest is independent of the index.
This works since I've attached a data-tab-index="<int>" to each
header link in my widget code, but it's brittle - if someone adds a
tab later, the current indices will be broken. Earlier I relied on the
anchor on each tab, but that broke as well (and would probably break
if a new notebook page were inserted as well).
Solution 1
When the page is loaded you can get the tab list DOM object like this:
var tablist = $('ul[role="tablist"]')
And then you can click on the specifict tab, selecing by the text inside the anchor. So you don't depend on the tab index:
tablist.find('a:contains("Other Information")').click()
I think if you have two tabs with the same text does not make any sense, so this should be sufficient.
Solution 2
Even if you want to be more specific you can add a class to the notebook to make sure you are in the correct notebook
<notebook class="nt_to_change">
Now you can use one of this expressions in order to select the tab list
var tablist = $('div.nt_to_change ul.nav-tabs[role="tablist"]')
// or
var tablist = $('div.nt_to_change ul[role="tablist"]')
Solution 3
If the contains selector doesn't convince you because it should be equal you can do this as well to compare and filter
tablist.find('a').filter(function() {
return $.trim($(this).text()) === "Other Information";
}).click();
Where "Other Information" is the string of the notebook page
I didn't tried the solution I'm giving to you, but if it doesn't work at least may be it makes you come up with some idea.
There's a parameter for XML elements named autofocus (for buttons and fields is default_focus and takes 1 or 0 as value). If you add autofocus="autofocus" to a page in XML, this page will be the displayed one when you open the view.
So, you can try to add this through JavaScript, when the user clicks on the respective link -which honestly, I don't know how to achieve that by now-. But you can add a distinctive context parameter to each link in XML, for example context="{'page_to_display': 'page x'}". When you click on the link, I hope these context keys will arrive to your JS method.
If not, you can also modify the fields_view_get method (here I wrote how to do that: Odoo - Hide button for specific user) to check if you get the context you've added to your links and add the autofocus parameter to the respective page.
As you said:
This works since I've attached a data-tab-index="" to each header
link in my widget code, but it's brittle - if someone adds a tab
later, the current indices will be broken.
I assume that your app allow multi-user interaction in realtime, so you have to integrate somewhere in your code, an update part function.
This function will trig if something has changed and cleanout the data to rebuilt the index in order to avoid that the current indices will be broken.

Wicket (1.6) stateless form resets paging

I've already tried to find anything about that problem but I guess I either was not sure how to shortly describe the problem to find a solution or nobody else had that before which I can't think of. Maybe my thinking is wrong, too.
I have a stateless wicket 1.6 form with an ajax supporting panel (WebMarkupContainer with output id). The panel holds a dataview with paging navigator. The dataview itself is filled by a DataProvider.
The panel shows some entries from the database and below that is the navigator. by clicking any page on the navigator, the panel is refreshed (ajax) and shows content from that page. The page itself is not re-rendered by the browser.
When I now leave the page by navigating to another internal page (so basically when leaving the dataview-panel-page in any way) to open a detail page or so and then return to that dataview-page the navigator is resetted (because it's stateless I guess). The navigator can't remember which page to show and begins at the top of the first page again.
The question is: How can I solve this? I would like to i.ex. navigate to page 2 and then temporary leave the page for another internal page. When returning I want to be on page 2, focussed on the record where I clicked the link to "details" before. This also happens when I just open a new page in a new Browser tab.
Thank you!
Here's some code:
final WebMarkupContainer gamesPanel = new AjaxContainer("gamesPanel");
final DataView<Game> dataView =
new GameDataView("gameOverview", targetCurrencyModel, searchTextModel, gameFilterModel,
new GameDataProvider(searchTextModel, gameFilterModel, targetCurrencyModel));
dataView.setItemsPerPage(ITEMS_PER_PAGE);
gamesPanel.add(dataView);
final XNPagingNavigator navigator = new XNPagingNavigator("navigator", dataView);
navigator.setOutputMarkupId(true);
add(navigator);
You guys can try what I mean: The page I'm talking about is http://www.xbox-now.de. Just navigate to page 2, then click on details and return to main page.
I think you might use History API to push a new state when you click on navigation bar. In the new URL for the state you can include a parameter that indicates the index of the current navigator page.
You can customize your AJAX link in order to perform this operations when user click on it.
For more details on History API see Updating address bar with new URL without hash or reloading the page
I solved this in the NoWicket framework by introducing a model aware page cache which reuses page instances when hashcode/equals matches in the page model. You can see the implementation in the GitHub repo, try this implementation of the IPageFactory wrapper as a starting point, but it is more code involved there, just check out the code, debug the example and navigate the code to understand it better in order to apply it to your application. See your use case in action by trying this data table example in the documentation website (which you can also debug locally): http://invesdwin.de/nowicket/ajaxdatatable
Try changing the paging index, navigate to a different page and navigate back to the data table example page. You will still see the paging index that you left there.
Thank you guys for your replies. I've done it now another way. Used the base code from here and modified it in some ways. Added some nice css AttributeModifiers to indicate the actual page:
item.add(new AttributeModifier("class", new PageLinkCssModel(pageable, pageIndex, "active")));
Then I modified some code to add or reset the page parameter, that it's 1) used only once and 2) keeps all the actual page parameters which were there before adding own ones. So I am just appending the page number now. This way I can keep my initially mount path like www.foo.bar/path/path/path. Complete URL would now look like: www.foo.bar/path/path?page=123.
To pass my entered page (i.e. page=5) to the data provider I just had to override the providers iterator. It should start with the page I entered. Due to the ugly generated navigator URLs (which are extremly bad for SEO) I now have nice looking urls which are working independently what wasn't possible before. And that's also the reason why I could not get back to the correct page. The navigator URL was not lookup-able by wicket.
new DataView<GamePrice>("gamePriceOverview", new GameDetailDataProvider(gameId, targetRegion) {
#Override
public Iterator<GamePrice> iterator(final long first, final long count) {
return super.iterator(ITEMS_PER_PAGE * getCurrentPage(), count);
}
getCurrentPage() comes from the base template and gets the actual page number entered (if one is entered):
public long getCurrentPage() {
// -1 weil zero based
return getRequest().getQueryParameters().getParameterValue("page").toString() != null
? (getRequest().getQueryParameters().getParameterValue("page").toLong() - 1)
: 0;
}
So instead of having ugly SEO-unfriendly URLs which are also not compatible to work independant (directly enter the generated url) I now have the same URL I expect with an added page-parameter.
URL now would looks like:
http://localhost:8080/game/4249/de/doom-preorder?page=2
URL before was:
localhost:8080/game/4249/DE/doom-preorder?0-1.ILinkListener-gamePrices-navigator-navigation-2-pageLink
If I now go back from the detail page to the main index with active "Bookmarkable-Navigator", I correctly come back to the page and position where I left it (because of bookmarkable page links).
That's how I achieved this problem with a nice bonus: User- and SEO-friendly URLs.

EmberJS: programmatically adding a child view to a collection view without changing underlying content

My EmberJS app is confusing me a lot at the moment. I have a collection view, that in turn defines an itemViewClass of a custom view I have defined in my code. Something like:
App.CarouselView = Ember.CollectionView.extend({
itemViewClass: App.SlideView.extend(),
});
And this CarouselView is rendered inside a template that has a dynamic segment backing it (I hope this makes sense?) . The controller for these dynamic segment is an array controller because the model for these dynamic segments is a collection :) (more confusion, please let me know)
App.SlidesController = Ember.ArrayController.extend();
By now all of you have figured that I am basically rendering a bunch of slides inside of a carousel. And these are dynamically backed in the collectionView by setting the property
contentBinding:'controller' // property set in CarouselView, controller corresponds to SlidesController
The confusion begins now. I want to add a slide to the existing set of slides. So I provide a button with an action : 'add' target='view'
In the SlidesView,
actions:{
add: function(){
var carouselView = this.get('childViews')[0];
// SlidesView has carouselView and another view as it's child, hence this.get('childViews')[0] is carouselView
var newCard = carouselView.createChildView(App.SlideView.extend());
carouselView.get('childViews').pushObject(newCard);
}
}
The above piece of code sucks and hurts me bad. I want to basically add a new SlideView to my CarouselView collection programmatically upon a button trigger. But apparently Ember recommends that childViews should not be manipulated directly and I ought to instead change the underlying content.
It states in my console.log that manipulating childViews is deprecated etc.
So essentially I need to add something to my content to my SlidesController content ? However, I don't want to add something to the content, this is just a soft add, that is providing the user with a slide so that he may choose to edit or add something if he wants to. He can always discard it. A hard add that will require me to persist the new slide to the DB will come once the user decides to save this information.

Passing data from page to page

I'm looking for the best practice on how to pass data from page to page.
In Page A I have a button that fires off Page B.
On Page B I have 6 textboxes that allow the user to enter information.
When the user is done, the click on a button that brings them back to Page A.
I want to pass that data back to Page A.
I've seen suggestions to:
build XML documents and save to Isolated Storage
use the App class to store information in properties
pass it like a query string
I'm looking for the Best practice. Is there one that Microsoft recommends or one that is generally accepted as the best way?
Thanks
PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["yourparam"] = param
NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/view/Page.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
then in other page simply
var k = PhoneApplicationService.Current.State["yourparam"];
Personally I'd store the values entered on Page B in a model(object) that is also accessible to Page A.
Depending on how you're navigating to Page A the second time, one or more of the following may be usful to help understand passing values between pages:
How to pass the image value in one xaml page to another xaml page in windows phone 7?
Passing a complex object to a page while navigating in a WP7 Silverlight application
How to pass an object from a xaml page to another?
How to pass a value between Silverlight pages for WP7?
How do I navigate from one xaml page to another, and pass values?
One thing you can consider is to use MVC: let your App be the controller, store all data in the model, and the pages are just views that contains pure UI logic. In this case your pages are painters and you pass your model object around. This gives nice isolation of business logic and the UI so that you can rev them easily.
BTW, Silverlight and XAML are great tools for MVC so it's a natural match.
There's a couple of things at play here. First of all, if/when the user uses the Back button to return to page A instead of your button, is the information in the text boxes exchanged or not (is Back = Cancel, or is Back = OK?)
That said, if you're using NavigationService.GoBack (which you should be instead of NavigationService.Navigate, because if you use the Navigate call, repeated hits of the back key will cause all kinds of bad UX for your users), then QueryStrings are not an option. Because pages really have no way to reference each other in the WP7 Silverlight nav system, you need to use a 3rd party to hold your data. For that, you can turn to (a) Isolated Storage (slow & heavy, but fail-safe), (b) Use the PhoneApplicationService.State dictionary, or (c) use Global properties of some kind, either hung off of the application object, or using Statics/Singletons...
Remember to watch for Tombstoning behavior when you do this - your page will process the OnNavigatedTo method when (a) you navigate into it in your application (b) you navigate back to it when you complete your work on Page B, or (c) you tombstone your app from that page and return to your application using the Back key.
Sorry I didn't give a more direct answer there - a lot depends on your specific circumstances. In the most general case, I'd strongly consider using the App State Dictionary on the PhoneApplicationService...it is lightweight, easy to use, and survives tombstoning. Just be sure that your keys are as unique as they need to be.
If you create a new Windows Phone project and use the Windows Phone Databound Template you will have most of the work done for you.
What you will want to do is set up the ViewModel to contain all the data for your app. You can serialize and deserialize this data using IsolatedStorage so that it's saved across application sessions and when Tombstoning.
In the template you will notice MailViewModel and ItemViewModel. MainViewModel stores all the data your application needs including an ObservableCollection of ItemViewModel, and ItemViewModel represents the individual data type for your application.
On the DetailsPage.xaml page you'll want to DataBind each textbox to the App.MainViewModel Items. Set the binding to TwoWay if you want the ViewModel to get updated as soon as the user manipulates the data on DetailsPage.xaml. You can optionally set the Binding to OneWay and then have an OK button that writes the changes back to the ViewModel and saves to IsolatedStorage.
Here is an example of what a Binding looks like:
<TextBlock x:Name="ListTitle" Text="{Binding LineOne}" Margin="9,-7,0,0" Style="{StaticResource PhoneTextTitle1Style}"/>
In this case LineOne is a property in ItemViewModel and the page gets this data from the query string when the user selects an item from the MainPage.xaml. The DataContext for the page determs where the databound information comes from.
Here is the snippet where the MainPage passes the selected item from the ViewModel to the DetailsPage.
// Handle selection changed on ListBox
private void MainListBox_SelectionChanged(object sender, SelectionChangedEventArgs e)
{
// If selected index is -1 (no selection) do nothing
if (MainListBox.SelectedIndex == -1)
return;
// Navigate to the new page
NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/DetailsPage.xaml?selectedItem=" + MainListBox.SelectedIndex, UriKind.Relative));
// Reset selected index to -1 (no selection)
MainListBox.SelectedIndex = -1;
}
Here is how the DetailsPage gets the selected item.
protected override void OnNavigatedTo(NavigationEventArgs e)
{
string selectedIndex = "";
if (NavigationContext.QueryString.TryGetValue("selectedItem", out selectedIndex))
{
int index = int.Parse(selectedIndex);
DataContext = App.ViewModel.Items[index];
}
}
Play around with the default template above and ask any additional questions.
The beauty of databinding and the ObservableCollection is that you can just update the data and the UX will reflect those changes immediatley. This is because any changes to the data fires off an event:
public string LineOne
{
get
{
return _lineOne;
}
set
{
if (value != _lineOne)
{
_lineOne = value;
NotifyPropertyChanged("LineOne");
}
}
}
NotifyPropertyChanged() that broadcasts this information to the View.
You can also keep it simple and use PhoneApplicationService.Current.State which is basically a hashtable. You will need to implement your own marshalling to and from isolated storage if you want anything to outlive the app.
Omar's suggestion to use the Windows Phone Databound Template is probably the best idea on this page. It amounts to the same as my suggestion but you will get a better result (more maintainable code) at the cost of a longer steeper learning curve.
I suggest you do it my way and then do it again Omar's way.
as i implemented like this.. Whether its correct or not i dont know..
When u click news list page it should open the news detail page.
I want to pass the selected news item contents from news List-Page to news-details Page.
the News list page contains following method.
protected override void OnNavigatedFrom(System.Windows.Navigation.NavigationEventArgs e)
{
NewsDetailsPage newsDetailPage = (e.Content as NewsDetailsPage);
if (newsDetailPage != null)
newsDetailPage.SelectedNewsItem = SelectedNewsItem; //Contains the news details
base.OnNavigatedFrom(e);
}
In the News details Page. U can access that(SelectedNewsItem) object.
This may or may not be correct.
One option is to use Application.Resources:
Store data:
Application.Current.Resources.Add("NavigationParam", customers);
NavigationService.Navigate(new Uri("/Page2.xaml", UriKind.Relative));
Retrieve data:
var customers = (List<Customer>) Application.Current.Resources["NavigationParam"];
Here's a blog post with describes this in more detail: http://mikaelkoskinen.net/windows-phone-pass-data-between-pages-application-resources/ (author: me)

MVVM Light: Where do I instantiate a class from a model and how do I update/access it?

Right now, I'm working on my first WP7 app and have run into some questions, which I haven't been able to answer despite reading what I could find online. Please consider an app that has a main page, a parameters page and a results page. In the parameters page, the user can enter or update numbers in various textboxes. Hitting the back button takes the user back to the main page, where there is a button called "Calculate". Hitting that button should take the data, perform a calculation with it and take the user to the results page presenting a grid with the results.
In a file called Calculator.cs I have a class called Calculator inside a folder called Models. I also have my MainViewModel.cs, ParametersViewModel.cs, and ResultsViewModel.cs files inside the ViewModels folder and the corresponding MainPage.xaml, along with Parameters.xaml and Results.xaml inside a folder called Views. I'm assuming that all the data will be manipulated within the instance of the Calculator class and then a results set will be returned and directed to Results.xaml. I'm just at a loss as to where to instantiate the Calculator class, pass it data, then retrieve the results. I'm also somewhat puzzled how I will trigger the automatic navigation to the Results page when the calculation is done.
Any help with this would be greatly appreciated.
UPDATE: Passing a complex object to a page while navigating in a WP7 Silverlight application has some more info on the same subject. I can go into App.xaml.cs and add something like this:
public class Foobar
{
public string barfoo = "hah!";
}
public static Foobar myfoob = new Foobar();
Then access it from a ViewModel page, e.g. AboutViewModel.cs, like this:
public AboutViewModel()
{
string goo = App.myfoob.barfoo;
}
But at this point I'm still uncertain what unforseen effects that might have. I'm going to tackle serialization/tombstoning at this point to see what happens with either this approach or by using the same DataContext across pages. Otherwise, one of the posters in the link above mentioned serializing the params and passing them between pages. My concern there would be whether or not there is a character limit as with HTTP GET. Seems there is: URI Limits in Silverlight
There are of course lots of possible designs - and lots of them are correct in different ways!
Here's one I might use:
The Calculate button press should trigger the Navigate to the Results page
On navigate to, the Results page should show some animation (maybe just a progress bar)
On navigate to, the Results page should create a new ResultsViewModel, passing in the MainViewModel as parameters
the constructor (or some init method) of the ResultsViewModel should spark up a thread to do the calculation
when this calculation is complete, then the relevant properties of the ResultsViewModel will get set
at which point the databinding on the Results page will clear the animation and show the results
Other solutions are definitely available - will be interested to read what other people suggest and prefer.
As an aside, one thing to watch out for on your Results page is tombstoning - could be an interesting challenge!

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