Options for making an existing IntraWeb application "responsive"

[magosk]

We have a large IW application dating back some 20 years. It is designed for desktop/laptop use and (currently) does not work very well on a mobile device (it basically requires a lot of zooming and panning from the users in order to see / do what they want on a phone). For this reason we also added a mobile friendly web application built with IW + CGDevTools JQuery Mobile, providing a subset of the functionality in the main web application. This combination has been sufficient for most of our customers, but now we have a large public procurement where our system would be a very good candidate, except that one of their requirements is that the (main) web application should be "responsive", i.e. automatically adapt to desktop/laptop/tablet/phone screens.

Technically, all web forms in the main web application inherit from either a "base menu web form" or a "base web dialog", both of which are inherited from the same "base web form". These base forms both contain some common visual elements (e.g. at the top of the screen) and some common code. We also use frames a lot, both as reusable parts in web forms and for modal dialogs. Controls used in the forms are mainly standard ones that existed in the early IntraWeb days, e.g. TIWLabel, TIWEdit, TIWButton, TIWCheckBox, TIWComboBox (and the data-aware versions), TIWDBGrid, TIWMenu, TIWImageFile, TIWLink, etc. And we have CSS files to control colors, fonts. etc. 

What are the options for making such an existing IW application "responsive"? I assume one option would be to use IW Bootstrap controls? But I guess that would mean rewriting basically the whole web application? I could note that we could probably be satisfied with the web application being just "acceptable" on a mobile device, so that we can "tick the box" in the procurement requirement list for this potential customer. Then in practice, their end users will probably use our web application from a desktop/laptop anyway.

All feedback on this is appreciated.

Best regards

Magnus Oskarsson

[Alexandre Machado]

Hi Magnus,

I would definitely use templates and let my components just the way they are (except the TIWMenu, it would be replaced by the template itself)

There are many advantages in using this approach:

- You can apply it to part of the system or as a whole, incrementally
- All your code will still work and the same visual components are used (links, edits, buttons, checkboxes, comboboxes, radio buttons, everything can be used with a template just the way it is)
- You can disable the template or enable it and have your form(s) both ways in 2 different sessions (e.g. you can leave as is for now for Desktop sessions and turn the templating on for mobile sessions)
- Even DBGrids can be easily incorporated in templates via DataTables (the new IWDBGrid/IWGrid rendering was especially modified to integrate with DataTables with absolutely zero changes).

I wouldn't look any other direction to be honest.

If you need some ideas on how to start I can arrange something (of course I'm not a web designer so my template would be kind of simple, but it will definitely work   )

[Alexandre Machado]

BTW, this is a live demo showing a standard IWDBGrid with DataTables templating.

Simple, but looks nice. Basically zero lines of code required. This specific example is not responsive but DataTables can be made responsive, yes.

https://intraweb.net.br/IWGridDataTables/

[magosk]

Thanks for the feedback Alexandre!

I have not worked with templates before, so a simple demo on using it to achieve responsiveness would be very much appreciated. There is in fact already an account for Atozed in our test environment for this web application which we set up for another issue earlier, you could use that just to get a quick feel for what our web application looks like. I will resend you URL and login credentials by mail together with some info.

I will also look at the grid demo you provided. And if you have any good link(s) for a general description for using templates in IntraWeb that would be very useful too.

Best regards

Magnus Oskarsson

[joelcc]

Definitely go with templates. We have used them for 20 years and you can make them as responsive.