Building blocks for user interface design

Once you are satisfied with the functionality of your application you might want to change the look and feel. There are 3 basic approaches to do this.

Making basic changes to the standard user interface

In this approach the application engine builds all the pages according to the blueprint, but the look and feel of the pages is slightly modified. This approach is preferred when the basic structure of the user interface meets most requirements, but minor changes are in order such as changing some colors and fonts, or surrounding the dynamic page content with a different more or less static html design. Techniques to do so include:

• Changing the css (read more) 
• Changing or creating the surrounding page (read more)
• Changing the actual html that is rendered by the engine page using velocity snippets (read more) 
  
  

Adding velocity templates within the blueprint

The previous approach is a bit limited in terms of how your data will be displayed, since the layout of the pages is always generated by the application engine. In case you want to present data with a different layout at the class or section level, you can add templates to your blueprint. A template is developed with the velocity template language. You can add templates in different locations, but the most obvious and frequently used location is a template to present object details from a class (read more).

Adding velocity templates outside the blueprint

Approach 1 and 2 still follow the standard workflow of your application. In case you want to manipulate the workflow, you can add extra pages to your application, e.g. a dedicated home page. In this approach a web/designer usually designs a set of html-pages. These are extended with velocity scripts to get the desired dynamic behaviour.

This approach is often used to create:

• A public website "on top" of the application.
• Tailor made (dynamic) reports made out of data of your application

This approach should be considered when major changes to pages are required. Obviously this strategy is more time consuming, needs more background knowledge and requires more maintenance. So consider these points carefully when adopting this approach (read more).