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Monday, October 17, 2016

Welcome the EnableMultipleBrowserTabsSupport feature toggle for an XAF Web app - YOUR FEEDBACK IS NEEDED

Starting with v16.1.8+, we have made improvements for a quite popular ASP.NET scenario - working with several independent XAF views within tabs of the same web browser instance. Previously, it was not easily possible as the XAF web site stored the information about the current main window within the ASP.NET session between requests (learn more...). Technically, it still does, but now each loaded web window has a unique identifier by which all its requests are correctly routed on the server.

Now, with the new EnableMultipleBrowserTabsSupport feature toggle for your Web application, you can, for instance, include hyper links to two different XAF views into a customer email, and clicking these links subsequently would result into opening two separate browser tabs with the ability for an end-user to work with them independently.


To test this functionality in your Web project, do the following:
1. Install this hot fix build (or any other v16.1.8+ build when the link stops working);
2. Modify the YourSolutionName.Web/Global.asax.cs file to set the static WebApplication.EnableMultipleBrowserTabsSupport  property to True in the constructor or the Application_Start method. For instance:

namespace XCRM.Web {
    public class Global : System.Web.HttpApplication {
        public Global() {
            DevExpress.ExpressApp.Web.WebApplication.EnableMultipleBrowserTabsSupport = true;

So far, our tests were pretty stable, and we have not found any issues in standard XAF Web scenarios. We still want to collect more feedback and hear from you about how this works in your real projects. The more scenarios we cover at this stage, the better for the product. Take special note that this will still be in the preview state in XAF v16.1. If all goes according to plan and if nothing serious is found, this functionality will be officially released in the upcoming 16.2 build, which should be out around early December.

UPDATED:
See the http://dennisgaravsky.blogspot.com/2017/01/follow-up-on-enablemultiplebrowsertabss.html

18 comments:

  1. We have been waiting for this for long time... Very nice to here it is coming finally!

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  2. thx Guys - so next is ASPxTabControl ? :)

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    Replies
    1. Do you mean Tabbed MDI on the Web, Noxe?

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    2. Yes ! Is it in the roadmap ?

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    3. Thanks for your feedback! Not yet - our team will take it into account for the future. BTW, will not opening separate tabs using the Control+mouse click or context menu be an alternative for this functionality?

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    4. Yes, of course. But, I think the must is the capability to open only the view (without navigation menu, etc...) in browser popup.

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    5. @Ahmed: Thanks for your clarification. We'll bear this request in mind.

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  3. Hello, I enabled the functionalities but I cannot understand how to test it... What I need to do to open something in another browser tab?
    Thanks
    G

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Hello,

      Thanks for your interest. You can consider the following testing plan:
      1. Set the EnableMultipleBrowserTabsSupport option to True in the MainDemo.Web app, run it and open Contact_DetailView for Sam (first tab);
      2. Copy the URL for this DetailView and insert it into the second tab;
      3. Now click the Task navigation item in the first tab;
      4. Refresh the second tab and notice you are still see a contact details;
      5. Retest the steps 1-4 when EnableMultipleBrowserTabsSupport =False and see the difference.

      You can also check the scenario with email links I described in the very beginning.

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    2. Thank you for this feature, i'm waiting it for a long time.

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  4. Any possibility to open menu items into another tab (maybe with middle button click) ?

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    Replies
    1. Our team will take your request into account for the future, thanks.

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  5. So all you talk about here is multiple browser TABS. (1) Does XAF now work in multiple browser WINDOWS? (2) Does this work in all major browsers (IE, Chrome, FF)?

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