Hello,
Since you aquired Telerik, I believe you plan on changing Rollbase HTML form inputs so that it uses kendo UI components.
We have heard that their may be a release this summer which changes Rollbase look and feel by integrating Kendo UI components instead of today's bootstrap components.
As of today, we use many jQuery JavaScripts in our pages in order to manipulate fields (show / hide them depending on the context for instance). In order to do this, we use jQuery to retrieve components who are named "rbi_F_...." or "rbi_L_...." which is the name assigned by Rollbase to tables cells who contain form inputs.
Also, we interact directly with certain form inputs by using their integration name which is set in the "id" and "name" properties of each HTML inputs.
When you finally integrate Kendo UI to Rollbase, do you know if their may be changes to the names / ids being used in form inputs, table cells, tables etc.?
If their are indeed changes of the sort, can you give us some information on to what is going to change exactly, because this would mean our applications will not be functional anymore if we are not prepared for this changes.
Kind regards,
Romain.
I would like to understand the use case where you needed to access the form element container (rbi_F_ and rbi_L_).
Rest assure that the method to refer form inputs via id and name as integration name is not changing. However, Kendo UI does put a wrapper around the HTML element to provide styling of their own, which means to make visible changes to some form elements (say picklist which would be kendo dropdownlist) you will need to use Kendo APIs exposed on that element.
e.g. $('[name=statePicklist]') would be what you are using now to get the picklist and change values.
with Kendo dropdownlist wrapper, this would change to $('[name=statePicklist]').data('kendoComboBox').select(...)
To summarize, form elements id and name are not changing with the Kendo integration. Neither are any of the documented methods to access such elements (rbf_getSectionBy...). We also are trying to minimize the changes to such elements in the undocumented part but some places may require restructuring to move towards a cleaner and easy to access solution.
Hello,
Please see the quoted text below regarding the integration with Kendo UI.
"The Kendo UI integration is part of a larger effort called New UI which is planned to be released for 4.0. However, Kendo UI is only part of the equation.
The big picture is this:
1. Existing customers will be able to use both the New UI and the existing UI (We call it Classic UI). They will be able to run their applications without breakage in the Classic UI. In the New UI, their mileage may vary depending on the kind of customizations they have done.
2. The New UI uses Kendo UI as you mentioned but also Bootstrap V3. Bootstrap V3 is not compatible with V2, which is the version that is in use in Classic UI. That may affect customers in general and from what you are mentioning below it’s likely to affect this customer.
3. The New UI has a different structure and is responsive. It does not use (as much) tables, table cells, ect…. for example where we used to have some
| elements we now have Bootstrap row and columns. 4. We have tried to preserve some of the IDs as much as possible, but even when you can access the element by ID, you may not be able to apply the same logic to the element in New UI than in Classic UI. A good example is the time control (details below). 5. We are preserving custom header/footer and custom sidebar functionality in the sense that a customer will be able to customize New UI using similar techniques that they used in Classic UI (Using Jquery, JavaScript and CSS overrides). 6. We are improving how customers can override CSS rules. We have separated what rules we intend customers to override vs fixed ones. 7. We are adding some built-in themes. Some of the customizations may not work well in some themes (particularly when they hardcode colors). All in all, we hope that we made the right compromises between bringing up new technologies, functionalities and a more modern UI while maintaining enough backward capabilities. We hope that having the 2 UI mode will provide a nice migration path to the customers. Obviously, it would interesting to find out from them where there are difficulties and where we can smooth them. Please let us know. Regards, Thierry". Let me know if you need more information on this. Thanks, Gian |
The Kendo UI integration is part of a larger effort called New UI which is planned to be released for 4.0. However, Kendo UI is only part of the equation.
The big picture is this:
As an admin you will have a flag to turn new UI for admin users only so that they can evaluate how the application behaves under New UI without affecting non–admin users. When satisfied you will be able to turn new ui ON for all users.
All in all, we hope that we made the right compromises between bringing up new technologies, functionalities and a more modern UI while maintaining enough backward capabilities.
We hope that having the 2 UI modes will provide a nice migration path for you
Obviously, we are interested in finding out where there are difficulties and where we can smooth them. Please let us know.
Regards,
Thierry Ciot.
Hello,
Thank you for your answers.
We are thrilled to hear about the idea of now having two UI modes (Classic UI vs New UI).
Most of our customers have admin users, and we would like to make the change from Classic to New UI customer by customer (which means having the admin users on the Classic UI as well for some time).
Will we be able to chose for a whole customer (admins and non-admins users) to be in Classic or New UI?
Also, we really like the choices you are making on the new UI to give up on the current HTML structure mainly composed of HTML tables and move towards a more modern web application.
All around this is great news for us,
Can't wait to try it.
Kind regards,
Romain Pennes.
Thanks for the positive feedback.
>> Will we be able to chose for a whole customer (admins and non-admins users) to be in Classic or New UI?
Yes the New UI flags I was referring to above are at thetenant level only (Customer object)
In other words, it's not at an application level it's at the customer/tenant level.
Thierry.
Romain,
I'm glad to hear you are excited about the UI improvements we are making. We feel that now is the time to make them and we are trying to minimize the disruption to our existing customers. Since it is not feasible to maintain two UI paths forever, the switch we are adding will be removed and the new UI will be the only one that is available. We are currently thinking that 6 mos. is a suitable time to allow our customers to make the changes that will be needed to ensure compatibility. I know that you may have a unique situation, so If you have any questions or concerns about this timeframe, please feel free to reach out to me offline and we discuss.
To avoid confusion when new release comes out, I just wanted to provide an update on this as we have changed how this is working based on various feedback:
We are giving customers more flexibility in migrating to the new ui.
Thierry.
Summary:
Details:
Common options for Root & existing customers who stay on classic UI after the update
Setup > Administrative Setup > Preferences shows up options to selectively enable New UI