Streamline UI: Remove Redundant Elements

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Source

You can get the GitHub Source Files here.

Overview

Redundancy: the state of being not or no longer needed or useful.

Only the Application Designer can determine which elements on a Page are redundant.

For this example, the following are the items we consider redundant:

Notes:

1. The more redundant items are removed, the more space is recovered to display more information to the user (outside the scope of this example).
2. When removing items, the Row= attribute may need to be reduced to avoid empty rows.
3. Some constants may be combined into a single Row.

Remove Redundant elements

Cleanup the Page Look by eliminating redundant items. Often, when removing full rows (as shown below), we can reuse empty space by moving remaining rows up.

Here we show the partial process required to remove redundant items and reorder some rows :

Note: Use the source repository to review the final state of this modification.

VALUES and associated Text

We have removed the Command key option labels from the screen the Selection column in the subfile now shows a dropdown-list.

But the Legacy DDS VALUES keyword shows the valid values, but does not describe what each value means.

0010.00     A            SFSEL          2Y 0B  8  4VALUES(0 2 3 5 7 9 10 11)           000000
0011.00     A                                      EDTCDE(Z)                           000000

Migration VALUES	After updating TextValues

The definition for field SFLSEL was manually changed to:

<DdsDecField Col="3" ColSpan="4" 
    class="dds-text-left"
    For="SFLC.SFL1[rrn].SFSEL"
    ValuesText="' ','Update','Display sales','Deliv. Addresses','Create sales rec.','Print sales (Online)','Print sales (Batch)','Orders'"
    ValuesTextOptionSeparator="="
    VirtualRowCol="@row,4" 
    EditCode="Z" 
    tabIndex=@pageTabIndex++ />

For reference, the field is defined (in the Model) as:

    [Values(typeof(Decimal),"00","02","03","05","07","09","10","11")]
    [Dec(2, 0)]
    public decimal SFSEL { get; set; }

Note:

1. To make it easier to present in this example, the field properties for SFLC.SFL1[rrn].SFSEL are shown using one property per line. (New lines in Markup are ignored).
2. The ColSpan property was added to override the default (which is the largest length of the value text items).
3. The number of ValueText items must match the number of Values in the Model definition.
4. The optional property ValuesTextOptionSeparator="=" was added to match the Legacy Option syntax. (If not given, only the text labels are used).

Results

Before	After

Note: After removing redundant elements, horizontal scrolling may disappear.