Tabs in UI

[Skippy]

I would like to model a web page which has tabs.  However, the tab control has three tabs, the first of which is selected.  How can I represent tabbed interfaces with a different number of tabs?  How can I represent a page with a tab other than the first one selected?

I am not sure if this is a bug or something I have missed.  Unfortunately the help pages on this are a bit thin on the ground.

[Eve]

The UI controls don't allow you to put in your data for display. It's just never been implemented.

[Skippy]

Is there any chance that it could be in the future?  I have been looking at the NZ product Screen Architect.  This does do what I need, but it's so buggy and unstable that it's unusable.

[Graham_Moir]

You should put in a formal feature request, although don't hold your breath in anticpation of it being delivered.  

Screen Architect seems to have been abandoned by Catch.  Perhaps Sparx could take it on and provide the functionality that way ?

[Skippy]

It's sad that 'Crash Software' doesn't take SA more seriously.

I have solved the problem with the program's instability: you need to reboot the machine after installing (obviously this should have been part of the installation procedure, not hidden in the 'help').   SA is not such a bad program if you can figure it out despite the hopelessly inadequate 'help' - which appears to have been written by somebody who was barely literate.

In any case, though, the two programs don't actually work very well together because EA creates a single object for an entire page created by SA.  If you create the UI in EA it's more limited, but at least you can link individual items to objects in your code.

[jfzouain]

Hi
I don't know what kind of problem you had with Screen Architect, but it have worked for me, with Tab and fields and so on.
Have the latest version and is working OK for me.

[Skippy]

I have got it going now (as I mentioned above, I needed to reboot after installing it).  However it produces pages which convert to single classes in EA. This means that I can't link to specific items in the page, such as a grid.  In this respect the UI prototyping in EA seems more useful, although not being able to prototype tabs properly is a big drawback.

Any thoughts on this would be welcome.

[Paolo F Cantoni]

I have got it going now (as I mentioned above, I needed to reboot after installing it).  However it produces pages which convert to single classes in EA. This means that I can't link to specific items in the page, such as a grid.  In this respect the UI prototyping in EA seems more useful, although not being able to prototype tabs properly is a big drawback.

Any thoughts on this would be welcome.

if the component items are attributes in the class then you can use the "Link to Element Feature" functionality to link other objects to specific attributes of the Class.

HTH,
Paolo

[Skippy]

Thanks for your help.

>>if the component items are attributes in the class then you can use the "Link to Element Feature" functionality to link other objects to specific attributes of the Class.

But a UI diagram created in SA comes into EA as a single class.  I don't see how to break it up.  Am I missing something obvious?

[Paolo F Cantoni]

Thanks for your help.

>>if the component items are attributes in the class then you can use the "Link to Element Feature" functionality to link other objects to specific attributes of the Class.

But a UI diagram created in SA comes into EA as a single class.  I don't see how to break it up.  Am I missing something obvious?

Probably not, I'm not familiar with the way SA works.  

However, in other area there are many cases where things could be described by various metamodels.  For example: a DB table could be described as a Table Class "linked" to it's column, index and constraint classes.  (Similar to the way EA considers UIs)

Or it could be modelled (as EA does) as a Table class with the columns, indexes etc modelled as features in the same class.

So although the table is one single class, its various properties are not opaque but exposed as class features.  Therefore you can use the feature I mentioned to link the individual class features to other things.

However, if SA creates a single "opaque" class for the screen, then there's nothing to "see" and, therefore, link to.

HTH,
Paolo