User interface — 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:

• Entry of new work objects and covers
• System-maintained worklists of assignments sorted by decreasing urgency
• Finding, reviewing, updating, and performing assignments

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:

• Section rules define the contents, appearance, and behavior of portions of harness forms.
• Fragments contain reusable HTML text elements not dependent on a class/
• Control rules determine the appearance of a single property on an HTML input form or display.
• Text File rules, which can define static aspects of your user interface such as Cascading Style Sheets or JavaScripts.
• Binary File rules, which identify images such as JPG or GIF files.

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:

• Harness rules preview and the Application Explorer — Allow you to interactively revise the content and the layout of a work object form or flow action form
• Branding wizard — Defines and maintains a family of styles for the User portal, work object forms, and reports
• Rules Inspector tool — Identifies the harness, section, HTML rules and properties that together make up a form
• Image Gallery gadget — Helps you find and identify the name of images that are available as binary file references
• Style Discovery tool and Style Viewer — Allow you to learn about and experiment with styles
• Clipboard tool — Shows the current property values in internal format

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 PRKB-26006 Top Ten Usability Guardrails.

	How stream processing works Validating user input User Interface category Understanding CSS styles
	Atlas — Standard Harness rules Atlas — Standard Portal rules Atlas — Standard Skin rules

Concepts