Faster opening of a DetailView with lots of items - XAF WinForms v17.2.6

How big is the DetailView in the question? 

Well, in the T581043 ticket's test project, there are 250 editors in the detail form layout. Big enough, huh?

How much we could speed it up? 

On our powerful test machines, the time to open DetailView with just plain editors (no layout groups or tabs) has dropped from 3 seconds to almost 1. In real world applications, time to open a detail view depends on the application configuration (controllers, data, collection properties, calculated fields) and deployment specifics.

If you cannot wait for the next maintenance update (v17.2.6), install this night build: DevExpressNETComponents-17.2.exe

My team and I would be interested in hearing whether it is something you and your clients will notice too or if there are any problems with that new build. Thanks in advance.

Regards,
Dennis

P.S. If you already migrated to XAF v17.2, make sure you set XafApplication > OptimizedControllersCreation to True as well (read the prerequisites in the docs, first). The How to measure and improve the application's performance article may also help your app perform faster (magically, just after looking at it😜), so check it as well in case of problems in other scenarios.

Survey (~1min): Default location of the Reset View Settings Action - YOUR FEEDBACK IS NEEDED!!!

This command is provided by the standard ResetViewSettingsController and resets all the user customizations of the View's model. It may be helpful when your client customized a lot and was stuck getting things to normal. Due to this scenario the command is available in the main menu toolbar or ribbon by default (+additionally duplicated in context menu in WinForms).

However, we wanted to hear the XAF community thoughts on this default design after receiving several user requests in this regard (examples: one, two, three). As of now, we have no easy capability to know real usages and customizations of XAF Actions in end client apps, so we would greatly appreciate it if you participate in this and coming surveys. Thanks for your help in advance.

https://dxsurvey.com/published?id=45965fae-dfc7-48ac-af26-aee17d2c3ec4

In fact, we already asked our user preferences when this feature was in development, but did not receive much feedback back then to hide this command from the main menu by default.

Web Layout Manager improvements and important changes in XAF v17.1

In the 17.1 version, we have improved the scenario of loading the ASPxPageControl tab content when XafApplication.DelayedViewItemsInitialization equals True and the Conditional Appearance module is involved. So, if you encountered missing or not fully loaded tab contents in this configuration, and had to previously adjust the application-level DelayedViewItemsInitialization or View-level DelayedItemsInitialization options to avoid this behavior (learn more...), starting with v17.1, it is possible to revert these options to True by default. 

Take special note that these improvements required us to introduce some changes, which may affect a very small group of users who created and registered custom layout group templates in WebLayoutManager. Frankly speaking, this was needed for very advanced scenarios (we could locate only a few cases in our large Support Center database), so we expect that the majority of XAF users will not be affected by these changes. Anyway, if you feel or know that you could have been affected, refer to the Web Layout Manager improvements and important changes in XAF v17.1 KB Article for more details.

BTW, have you ever created custom layout item and group templates for WebLayoutManager?:-) If so, please share your use-cases in comments. I am asking because it is quite possible that we already have better solutions for you (e.g., expandable/collapsible layout groups are already supported out-of-the-box)!

A WinForms example for collapsing/expanding layout groups and persisting their state

As you probably know, the New Web UI was recently enhanced with built-in options for this scenario. Today, I have updated the https://www.devexpress.com/kb=S135134 thread with a WinForms solution:

Please don't hesitate to write to us about each use case scenario that requires additional code to adjust the layout controls to better meet your business needs. My team and I will be more than happy to research them and see how to manage this situation better at the XAF or DevExpress component level. For instance, here we are thinking about providing platform-agnostic Application Model extensions for managing this task for Windows and the Web.

How to place all nested View commands into the main ribbon and activate them based on the selected layout tab

My next two posts will be devoted to advanced ribbon menu customizations in WinForms, which become much easier to implement with the introduction of the new Ribbon and Standard templates (WinApplication.UseOldTemplates = False) back in v14.2 and also API changes in the recent XAF versions.

The current post is about mapping ALL Actions from the nested Frame toolbar into the main ribbon menu by creating a separate page. It is planned that when you activate a certain nested ListView within a layout tab, its related View commands will be activated in a separate ribbon page as well (context-dependent commands). This somewhat exotic approach was requested a few times by different customers and is likely dictated by users who have a habit of using only the main ribbon menu, i.e., without moving the mouse to the bottom context.

The two pictures showing how it was before and after making necessary code changes + a video showing everything in action are worth a thousand words in communicating this effect in the real app.

Context-dependent Actions in ribbon

Usability improvements to the Model Editor layout designer and more in XAF v16.1.5

The recently released minor update brings several small, but useful features I hope you and your end-users will appreciate.

1. The layout designer available in the Model Editor at design time and runtime now generates a layout very close to what you can see in the end app. In particular, being invoked for the WinForms modules or apps, it now generates real Property Editors (in the disabled state and with fake data) instead of equivalent text boxes or bricks. It also tries to take into account and visualize the most popular layout and other options like ToolTip, ShowCaption, etc. IMHO, the most useful thing here is that you can now customize embedded ListView elements or List Property Editors corresponding to collection properties much easier via the grid control, like you can already do under the Views | ListView | Columns node. Even though the layout designer invoked for Web modules will not display real Web controls, but rather their corresponding WinForms analogs, the overall development experience will be better than before.

Web DetailView layout styling with the CustomCSSClassName attribute in the Model Editor

This small feature is available for the new XAF Web UI only, which is enabled by default in new projects starting from v15.2.7 and on. In short, the CustomCSSClassName attribute allows you to set a CSS class for a layout item or a group. Let's see how this works in practice.

For instance, to customize the color and size of the FullName view item, add the FullNameCSS CSS class in YourSolutionName.Web/Default.aspx file exactly as you would do this in a regular non-XAF ASP.NET application:

  

<!--...-->
<head runat="server">
    <title>Main Page</title>
    <meta http-equiv="Expires" content="0" />
    <style type="text/css">
        .FullNameCSS
        {
            font-size: 25px;
            color: darkblue;
        }
<!--...-->

Collapsible layout groups in the new XAF Web UI

Starting with v15.2, the new XAF web UI provides a built-in solution for this task. Please see a screenshot from our XCRM demo:

You can enable this feature for required layout groups in the Model Editor via the new IsCollapsibleCardGroup option at the Views | <DetailView> | Layout | level:

How to reset View customizations made by end-users (UPDATE)

I invite you to test an updated version of the previous E1897 solution (it is now marked as obsolete), which we are planning to include in v15.2 by default. The new solution supports both WinForms and ASP.NET apps and also works for both the root and nested Views (e.g., the ones embedded into ListPropertyEditor and DetailPropertyEditor):

Display issue with the WinForms layout customization form in v14.1.5

Please beware of the 

T130813: Layout.Win - The content of the layout customization form is incorrectly docked to the left  bug when upgrading to v14.1.5:

I recommend you download the hot fix build that corrects this behavior. 

We sincerely apologize for all the inconvenience here.

The CollectionsEditMode option gets more flexible

Let me quote myself from the 

Layout.Web - provide the capability to manage the display of detail collections, not on the global application level but, for each DetailView separately feature request, which we have just implemented in 13.2, while working on a bigger feature:

"Starting with the version 13.2, you will be able to control this behavior vis-a-vis the DetailView via the CollectionsEditMode property exposed in the Model Editor for Web projects:

 

[XML]
<Views>
    <DetailView Id="Contact_DetailView" CollectionsEditMode="View"></DetailView>
</Views>

The above setting in the XAFML file will enable the View mode only for the Contact DetailView, while the rest application will use the default mode or the one specified in code:

 

[C#]
protected override void OnLoggedOn(LogonEventArgs args) {
            base.OnLoggedOn(args);
            ShowViewStrategy.CollectionsEditMode = ViewEditMode.Edit;
}

Personally, I love when working on something big small things like this one get attention and are resolved. I hope you like this too:-)

A possible way to improve the ergonomics of a large and complex detail form

When something gets very complex and there is no space for all the info on the screen (imagine a form with 300 text boxes and other controls on it - yes, I saw such forms in my life!)  you can use various techniques to temporarily hide or completely remove certain info (probably rarely used) or allocate it in a way it will occupy less space.

Many container UI elements like tab controls, panels and our layout control are designed to help you with this task. Talking about XAF apps, the most popular way of accomplishing this I saw was putting unwanted fields behind the tab groups, which were activated by end-users on demand:

This approach does not involve any refactoring of your underlying data model, but just means re-layouting the default form in a way where most often used data appears on top while having less popular data hidden. It seems that this all comes from trying to mimic the behavior and look & feel of legacy apps or even papers, because many end-users might be accustomed to such a UI in the past.

Another, but less popular approach I saw was in refactoring a huge data model, which technically means aggregating similar data into a separate part, adding a reference to it from the main object and then showing a separate detail form on demand, e.g. via a button in the toolbar. A perfect example of this can be our ObjectPropertyEditor that can be used for an aggregated reference property and that displays a nice UI for editing its details:

Today, I would like to show you an alternative way of solving the problem of complex detail forms usability. I am double excited about this solution, because it comes from our XAF customer, Sergey Zaycev and his team from Galaktika, whom I recently blogged about.
These guys implemented a custom Property Editor - TabbedDetailPropertyEditor (check this help link to learn more on how it is possible to create such extensions yourself), which is essentially a tree-like navigation panel at the left side and a detail panel on the right. Each node in the tree represents a small portion of data, which is then displayed on the right side as user focuses it in the tree:

This hierarchy is fully customizable at runtime, thus allows you to meet the needs of a very demanding client right in front of his/her PC.


In my opinion, this is a very good alternative to the standard approaches described above. If you think about it, you may find the analogy with how the main application navigation works. Of course, this displaying a small portion of data at a time also works faster and thus is more usable.

I liked this idea very much, what about you?

If you liked this stuff, then I suggest you learn more on it as well as check out other XAFARI platform features at http://xafari.ru/