Visual Perspective

The Aware IM concept of the screen layout is called a visual perspective. The visual perspective defines the look and feel of an application. Aware IM always generates the default visual perspective, but in most cases configurators will change the default perspective to provide their own layout.

Visual perspectives allow configurators to define the following:

• Names of menu items as well as operations that they invoke (see Operations)
• Frames that will be present
• Initial layout of the main page
• Layouts of each frame. You can display several pages (tabs) within a frame. A user will be able to switch between pages. Each page can be further split up into several content panels. Every content panel can show an HTML page or show the results of a menu command (for example, run a query or a process).
• Color/font scheme (“theme”)

Configuration of a visual perspective is described in detail in the Adding/Editing Visual Perspectives section.

It is possible to define several visual perspectives for an application and switch between them when necessary. This may be useful if the application contains several relatively independent functional areas that need to look different to the user and/or offer different sets of menu operations. For example, there may be an area that provides management of forums and another area that handles orders and purchases. Switching visual perspectives is achieved by configuring a special type of a menu operation called “Change Perspective” (see Setting Menu Item Properties) – when a user selects the menu item of this type Aware IM shows the visual perspective configured for this menu item.