Possible to style buttons?

Hi Gertjan,

I do know about this, but not sure if that would work here (or maybe I just don’t know enough about the workflows yet).

As mentioned, the number of input sheets I want to deal with is around 25. For each of these sheets, there can be either warnings (meaning I can continue the flow, but user should give it a quick look) and errors (workflow cannot continue). And of course, green would indicate no issues on this input sheet.

In the example from the link you gave, I could do something like Validate/refine input sheets as a workflow item that would not allow to continue to the next stage as long as there are hard errors in the input. 

However, it is then not clear what the best way is to provide the user with the info about the 25 input sheets (which ones are OK (green), warning , stopping error)

How would you handle this with workflows?

One possibility I can think of would be if I could create buttons to open pages inside a table. In the post https://community.aimms.com/aimms-webui-44/how-to-change-specific-table-identifier-checkbox-to-a-image-button-555 I saw something about creating links/icons, but not sure if you can use these links to trigger opening a new page in the aimms webui.

Hello Guido, let me just emphasize and highlight what Gertjan has already achieved to explain pretty well.

Most importantly, I have to concur with Gertjan about taking care to not overload your users with an unwieldly interface. When having that many ‘pieces of information’ on screen, you really need to choose how to display those carefully.

25+ buttons probably falls into the ‘unwieldly’ category, for anyone. That same amount indeed also makes it very hard to manage/control it through the ‘standard’ ways of solving this, which is through Workflow and its states.

Regular Button widgets do not really have options to style them dynamically. Yes, you can of course control contents (and be creative with ‘icon font’), but you cannot control things like background colors through the model: you cannot apply annotations to it, like you can with the data of a table or chart.

Therefor, the suggestion to use a table cells or maybe a bar or line chart + custom css + item actions, to create a miniature dashboard that shows you all those 25+ states in one pretty compact overview, is I think indeed the most promising. Not easy, but all options are there.

If you could group your statuses into a number closer to maybe 10 groups, perhaps you could also get creative with Side panels. They too have tab labels, icons and colors that can be specified dynamically. You could re-use the Side panel on different pages and use the grouped sidepanel tab contents to navigate back and forth to specific pages. At least all those links/buttons could then be ‘out of view’ when desired, with the tab showing state.
Regular Side panel tabs are fixed to about 7 I think, but a simple line of css could alter the vertical size of Tab so you have slightly more space.
If you want to keeps things horizontal, maybe the Status Bar can do a similar trick for you.

Sounds like an exceptional case to me, whatever way we turn it. I hope you find some ideas among the above. And if you are looking at specific styling challenges, find me here too.

Best regards,

Edo

Normal behavior for a table cell is, of course, to get the focus, upon left-clicking. Or depending on the content/state: jump to edit-mode.

Maybe you could slightly abuse the Store Focus functionality to act upon a certain focus happening, and jump pages when it happens. Although you’ll probably surprise your user a bit.

Having your user go through a right-click to select an item-action is perhaps one click too many from the perspective of what you’re trying to achieve, but it does follow standards. Maybe you can even think of other actions that are relevant for a certain ‘state’ of your 25+ steps. Like ‘Resolve Manually (jump)’, ‘Resolve automatically’, and ‘Ignore’.

But bottom line is: it will not be a direct left-click jump without effort (using normal solution options).

I’m not envious of the amount of state-management that you’ll be needing to do for all of this (and are  probably already doing in some shape or form, now) ;-)

That might also be an option! Thanks @Madhu Krishnappa !

Also good to know!

Turns out, there are quite some different options :-)

Think I need to really learn more about the css stuff though...