Our app has a somewhat traditional layout of a header and footer across the top and bottom, a navigation tree on the left side, and a split panel on the right that separates the table list at the top and the form at the bottom, similar to the tutorial.
We project we may have the navigation open the right side into a Tabsheet so that users don’t have to lose their context as they use different components rather than just swapping views.
That said, often enough it’s nice to be able to have two windows side-by-side for comparison, or for using information in one component to help with another component. The single-page webapp makes this harder than in a JSP world where the user can just SHIFT-CLICK or RIGHT CLICK and open a link in another browser window.
We are thinking about adding RIGHT CLICK listeners in our navigation Tree, as well as in our Table lists, such that it would work the same as a regular click, but open the component in a Window rather than in their standard locations (like in a Tab when clicked from the navigation tree, or the bottom split panel when clicked from the Table).
If we take that approach, is there anything special we need to take into consideration? It seems that the controllers that handle the regular clicks and change views or set an Item into the lower split panel would just need to create a Window and add the same components into it instead.
Is it likely that straightforward, or are there issues we’ll need to address from your experience that can help us design this right?
I’d say that 90% of the user activity can stay in the single window approach with switching views and tabs, but that 10% of the time users will want to be able to see two such view side-by-side.
Thanks for any insights that people may have, or other approaches that maybe have proven to work better.