Well, last night was spent on playing with the layout to attempt to make the new views in Web Dynpro look the same as the BSP views I generated so long ago. So, what have I learned so far. Web Dynpro layout can be a royal pain…
1. Transparent_Container – so far this has become my best friend. it allows you to group certain elements and apply whatever formatting you need just for those elements. Plus you can embed the containers inside of other containers, so using this feature has finally allowed me to start reproducing the look and feel I was hoping to get.
2. Text_View – this is “so far” the best option I’ve found for titles. What I don’t like about it is the limited number of formats you can apply. So this means you can’t directly control the font/size. From my google research, this appears to work as designed, so you just have to accept. Now I have seen mentioned to the formatted text view, but I have yet to try this. I’m sure that will come up in my experiments soon 🙂
3. Attributes inside of any container are very powerful, but you need to play with them to truly understand how they work. For example, stretching an element will only behave how you expect it if the container above it is also stretched to accommodate the entire screen. This may have to do with the inherit value, but again… I’m still learning this 🙂
4. Grid Layout vs. Flow Layout vs. Matrix vs. Row layout. This is still a little nebulous for me. I’ve got down the flow logic and grid logic, but haven’t quite figured out when to use row layout or matrix layout… so I’ll continue to experiment on this. However, Flow layout will just keep adding objects to the row until it runs out of space, and start a new row. Grid layout lets you select the number of columns for each row, and it will place an element into each column, then start a new row.
Well, that’s my AWDP tidbit for the day, I hope that my fumbling might make your life easier in the future 🙂
As always, thanks for reading and don't forget to check out our SAP Service Management Products at my other company JaveLLin Solutions,Mike