Working with Visual Perspective Editor

The editor of visual perspectives can be started as described in the Working with Configuration Elements section.

The working area of the editor contains a tree structure of a visual perspective – it lists all the frames of the perspective. You expand the frame to see its tabs (or menu). For each tab you can see its contents panels and for each menu you can see its menu items. You can select any element in this structure and set its properties in the Selection Properties window. The properties of the visual perspective itself can be specified at any time in the Element Property window.

The bottom half of the editor shows how the screen defined by the current properties of the visual perspective looks like in the Operation Mode (“embedded preview”). Any changes you make to the visual perspective’s properties are immediately reflected on the preview. To turn the preview on or off click on the icon in the toolbar at the top of the editor. To see how the preview looks in the standalone browser click on the icon.

The following properties of a visual perspective can be specified:

Specify the name of the visual perspective. The name must be unique among the names of other visual perspectives defined in the business space version. Any identifier is acceptable.

Description of the visual perspective

This property controls whether the visual perspective will be automatically used by Aware IM when a user with a particular access level logs in from the device of a particular platform (desktop, mobile phone or tablet). When you click on this property the “Used in Login” dialog will be displayed. Tick the “Aware IM will display this visual perspective when a user logs in” checkbox if you want Aware IM to use the perspective when the user logs in. If you do not select this option the visual perspective can only be used by another visual perspective when it makes a switch of perspectives (see below) or by rules in processes.

If you do select this option you can also specify the following options:

If this perspective should be used only when users belonging to certain access levels log in select the “Aware IM will display this perspective for users access levels selected below” radio button (by default the visual perspective applies to all access levels) and select the access levels you want the visual perspective to apply to.

You can specify that the visual perspective should only be used when the user logs in from devices of the selected type – desktops, tablets or mobile phones

Tick this checkbox if you want Aware IM to run the specified process immediately after the user logs in but before the visual perspective is displayed. If the process fails (for example by issuing the REPORT ERROR action), the system will automatically logout the user and display the appropriate error message. The initialization process can be used in the visual perspective of the system administrator to perform automatic initialization of the system with some default values (for example, automatically create and set the default values into the SystemSettings object if it has not been initialized yet – see Setting Initial Values of the Information System). Another initialization process can be used in visual perspectives of non-administrator users to check whether the system is initialized and issue an error if it is not.

Define this property if you want Aware IM to run the specified command immediately after the visual perspective has been displayed. You then need to specify the command to run in much the same way as you specify menu commands.

Define this property if you want Aware IM to periodically run the specified process in the background with the specified frequency. The background processes can be very effectively used in the combination with the DISPLAY MESSAGE ASYNCH action to display tips, adverts, check for new messages etc.

Using the drop down of this property you can choose the theme in which the visual perspective will be displayed. The theme includes a combination of colors, fonts, visual style, images etc. Aware IM comes with a number of pre-defined themes but you can also include your own themes.

Aware IM uses the Kendo UI library (see http://www.telerik.com/kendo-ui) and the themes used are the themes designed for this library. New themes are being created all the time and made available to the general public. If you find new themes for the Kendo UI library you can integrate them into Aware IM (or you can create your own themes if you are familiar with the HTML and CSS technologies).

See the How To Guide for more details on how to integrate custom themes into Aware IM.

Themes depend on the font size used. If you change the font size themes will adapt accordingly and will still look good. You can choose the font size for your theme here.

Tick this checkbox to display animation when one page replaces another page. This is especially useful for mobile applications.

This property defines the style of the left menu if one is available - either Classic or Modern (see pictures below):

Select this command from the menu to enable the “tour” feature for the visual perspective. The “Tour” feature allows configurators to add explanation to the elements of the visual perspective, so that the user can understand the screen better. The explanation of the element is displayed to the user at the bottom of the screen with the marker pointing to the element of the screen being displayed. The user can jump between the elements of the screen and Aware IM automatically scrolls to the element being explained and displays the marker for the element. For more details about tours see the “How to use the Screen Tour feature” in the How To Guide.

Tick this checkbox if you want to completely remove Aware IM logo and copyright message from the visual perspective – note that this feature is only available in the Developer Edition.

See also: Setting Menu Properties