Chapter 9
Building and Customizing Screens
WHAT YOU WILL LEARN IN THIS CHAPTER
- Understanding the role of data and layout items (the constituent parts of the UI)
- Working with layout containers and understanding how they provide elastic screen behavior
- Using data grids, lists, simple controls, and value pickers to build your screens
- Understanding the runtime customization feature of LightSwitch
- Creating methods and assigning them to buttons and links in the UI
- Changing the default screen navigation structure of your LightSwitch application
In Chapters 6 and 7, you created several screens and customized their layouts. The exercises there helped you try out simple layout manipulations. However, you have only scratched the surface of the features available in building LightSwitch screens.
In this chapter, you learn the most important concepts and the basic architecture of screens. You will go through many exercises to learn about each important element of building and customizing your screens.
UNDERSTANDING THE SCREEN LAYOUT STRUCTURE
By now, you have created several screens (including lists, search, and details screens) with the Add New Screen dialog. As you have already learned, LightSwitch uses a declarative approach to describe screen elements. Instead of positioning user interface (UI) controls with screen coordinates, LightSwitch uses a hierarchy to define the layout.
With many rapid application development (RAD) tools, a typical screen editor provides a WYSIWYG (What-You-See-Is-What-You-Get) ...
