Using Queries

Using queries to display data results should be one of the main vehicles of a mobile application.

Query results for standard presentation are displayed as a list of rows and columns with column headings – feel free to use them in your mobile applications. Obviously make sure that the columns fit on the mobile screen. You can even use the same queries as for desktop applications and turn visibility of certain columns off for mobile screens. In order to do this click on the “Display as” property in the list of query properties to bring up the “Display Query Results” dialog, select the column you want to turn off in the “Attributes to Display” dialog. Then click on the “More…” button above the attributes table and then click on the “Responsiveness…” button. Then define that the column should be invisible for small screen sizes.

If you query uses inline editing or filters make sure that you tick the “Mobile style rendering” checkbox available when you click on the More button in the “Other Settings” section of the Display Settings dialog. This will make sure that Aware IM uses a special mobile-friendly user interface for inline editing and filters.

This form of query presentation can be very useful for mobile applications – especially, the data template that allows display query results as thumbnails – see the picture below:

There are two options that you can choose in the Query editor when you define a custom query for mobile applications:

1. Use Custom Data Template
2. Use Mobile Data Template

The two types of templates above are implemented by different widgets and support different functionality.

The first template (Custom Data Template) supports the following features which are not supported by the “Mobile Data Template”:

1. Paging
2. Horizontal layout
3. Scroll View (this is a popular feature on mobile devices where the user can view one image at a time and swipe back and forth between images

We recommend that you use this template only if you need to display a horizontal layout of thumbnails or if you want to implement a “scroll view”.

In other cases you are better off using the “Mobile Data Template” (as shown on the picture above) which supports more mobile-friendly features, such as:

1. Infinite scrolling without the need to page explicitly
2. Group headings (you can group your data – for example, by the first letter and Aware IM will show the letter as the heading for the group. Moreover, it can keep displaying the group header while you are scrolling – “fixed headers”)
3. Checkbox selection of items
4. Simple filtering
5. The operations button. When the user taps on this button Aware IM pops down the list of operation applicable to the selected data item – see the picture below.

Calendars/schedulers are fully supported on mobile devices. Some views, though, such as timeline and agenda views may not look good due to limited real estate, however, daily, weekly and monthly views should look quite good.

Make sure that you tick the “Mobile-style rendering” option available through the More button in the “Other Settings” section of the “Display Settings” dialog. This will make sure that the calendar appointments are created using mobile-friendly interface.

This form of query presentation can be used as is in mobile applications.