Back Forward User interface — Concepts and terms

Concepts and terms

Bill Based on HTML and XML standards, Process Commander can support a wide range of user interaction facilities and approaches. Your application's user interface can take into account the environment, the domain knowledge of your users, their skills, locale, and language.

The appearance, branding, and interaction dynamics of your user interface can match the context and language that is natural to your application's users.

Evolving an application's user interface is best done by designers and developers who have both application domain knowledge and usability skills.

Producing HTML displays and forms

Process Commander includes standard facilities for those workers and managers who use Process Commander-based applications throughout the workday. These facilities support:

Sophisticated and powerful standard forms known as harnesses are designed for reuse and customization.

Defining user input forms and displays

For access through the standard portal, Process Commander uses harness rules (Rule-HTML-Harness rule type) for work objects. Six other rules support the presentation of work objects:

The HTML text you enter into HTML rules is known as source HTML. It contains ordinary HTML code plus JSP tags or directives — server-side instructions that Process Commander evaluates at runtime to compose the final HTML it sends to the HTTP server (and ultimately to a user's browser session). Known as stream processing, this evaluation accesses the clipboard for text values to insert into the output HTML, incorporate the text of other HTML rules, provide conditional if-then-else testing, and looping through arrays.

Harness forms use the pega:include JSP tag to incorporate multiple sections, which in turn use standard styles and fragments to present properties, labels, and images. For your application, you can copy and tailor parts of these forms as necessary, while inheriting the standard parts.

Tools

These tools support your evolution of the user interface of your applications:

Through open authoring, you can use an HTML editor of your choice to revise HTML text.

When a user submits an HTML form, Process Commander records the values entered into input fields as property values on the clipboard. The values that users enter may not be in the format required by the property definition, or may not pass validation tests.

Related PDN articles

See the Pega Developer Network article PDNPRKB-26006 Top Ten Usability Guardrails.

Related topics How stream processing works
Validating user input

User Interface category
Understanding CSS styles
Standard rules Atlas — Standard Harness rules
Atlas — Standard Portal rules
Atlas — Standard Skin rules
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