A Few Tips for Styling Responsive Forms with Aras Innovator
In previous posts, we’ve covered the basics of responsive forms. In this blog, we will dive even deeper and share some tips and tricks for making responsive forms more visually appealing to your end users. Here are a few tips on how to make your responsive forms convey more information in the same space. Nested columns In our first introductory blog on responsive forms, we outlined how your form can be broken down into columns to better organize your properties. A cool thing that you might not know is that you can actually break your columns into additional columns. While that might sound complicated, our UI makes it very simple to configure. Here’s a quick look at what this looks like in action: To configure this, you need to open your responsive form editor and just drag a box from the Structure tab into one of your columns: From here, you can select any of your unused properties and drop them directly into the new columns you’ve created. It’s important to keep in mind the length of your property when doing this and reserve this practice for shorter properties. Good examples are things like Revision, State, Generation, Part Number, and things like Booleans or Cost. Color coding important properties In another of my previous blogs, I showed how you can set rules to customize your forms. These can be based on things like who is viewing the form or what the actual value of the property is. This can be used in multiple different ways, but one that I’ve found useful is to check the current variable of your item and style the Revision property a different color if you’re not looking at the most current version of the Item. This gives your user a very quick visual indication that they might be looking at an older version of an Item. Here’s a quick look at what that rule would look like: Another great place to use this is on lifecycle/workflow states. Using a simple color code allows users to quickly understand what is happening with their Items once they open a form. I recommend playing around with these to see what is possible. In the same vein, utilizing rules to hide specific properties from identities is much easier than it was in the old form system. This allows you to have fewer specialized views, which require less maintenance. Concluding thoughts Responsive forms continue to receive enhancements with each release. There has never been a better time to give them a try, and trying is as simple as pressing this button on your Item’s form: Keep in mind that this button just changes your view and doesn’t overwrite any of your existing forms. You can freely switch back and forth between your classic and responsive forms. Give them a try, and let us know what you’re able to build! Consider sharing with colleagues via comments. We want to hear from you.Improvements in Configurable Web Services & Responsive Forms in Aras Innovator 32
In Aras Innovator® Release 32, we’ve made some important changes to two of our newest features. Responsive Forms and Configurable Web Services have seen enhancements that improve usability and reliability. Responsive Forms As one of the newest additions to Aras Innovator, we’re continuously working on improving Responsive Forms. With our newest release, we’ve added low-code logic that allows you to color the background, element, or text of your fields. This had to be managed with code in the past, but now you can use our simple rule editor, which I described in a previous blog. In addition, you can now add Boolean Operators when using multiple rules. This allows for finer control over your forms based directly on the data. This allows us to do things like the following: Responsive Forms can now be used in the Add, View, and Edit view types. This allows you to have different views based on how your users interact with your form. Configurable Web Services (CWS) There are a number of new features in CWS that will make it much easier to use for different use cases. One of the biggest ones is an easier File Upload. A new Upload Endpoint allows you to upload files with a single request, as opposed to the multi-step process from before. In addition, we’ve enabled developers to execute transactions in batches for both the REST API and CWS. This will reduce the number of server calls while improving transaction rollback if a request fails. Finally, for CWS, we’ve added the ability to allow specific API Keys to overwrite system properties. This needs to be handled very carefully but allows for powerful connections to external systems. It will be very useful when pulling items from other systems to federate them in Aras since you can do things like overwrite when an Item is created to match the value in the external system. This can be configured under the API Keys relationship in your CWS: These changes to two of our newest features are just the beginning. We’ve got some really exciting things coming in the pipeline. Please try out some of these new features and let us know how you like them on the forums. We’d love to hear some feedback and what we could do to better meet your needs.
