Custom master page for dialogs - master-pages

I am using a custom master page for branding, but the way I have designed it makes popup dialogs (like new item for lists) look terrible. I know I could probably change the design to make it work, but that would break the actual page (which for the moment looks perfect just the way it is).
My question therefore is this:
Is it possible to change the masterpage only for dialogs and popups?
The standard v4.master page looks just fine for dialogs when using my custom theme so branding is not such a big deal here.

I ended up messing with the design instead. This gave a satisfactory result.

Related

Embed Menu/PopupMenu or TListItems on a form

Is there any way to embed a TPopupMenu directly on a form, as if it was a panel always open? or maybe just the TMenuItems.
No, it is not possible to embed a menu on a form. The reason is partly that a menu isn't an ordinary window that you can easily manipulate.
So you need to find a different solution. And there are many options you can chose from:
Using a TToolBar:
It doesn't look particularly modern and out of the box you don't get much control over the appearance, though. Also, I don't know exactly how robust this solution is. I stopped using toolbars many years ago.
Using a TCheckListBox:
In this case, I'd recommend you to create a subclass TCheckListBoxEx which toggles an item if you double-click its caption.
Creating a custom control:
This is what I'd do if it is about a central GUI in an important application, because this way you get full control over the appearance and behaviour and can make it really robust. I have done a modern such menu at work, but currently I am at home so I cannot show you it. Here, however, is a menu I made more than ten years ago for a hobby project:
If you don't need the menu to be attached to the form like a control, but only need it not to close when you select an item in it, there are (hacky) ways to achieve that. But that is a different Q.

jquery mobile left menu

Throughout the jQuery Mobile docs, they use a left-side menu for navigation that changes to a more mobile friendly version when the browser width is smaller. You can see an example on this page.
They use this layout throughout the docs, and I can see in the source that they use two divs with the IDs "content-primary" and "content-secondary." My question relates to the fact that I can't find anything about this structure actually discussed in the documentation. It seems very strange that they would not include such a useful widget in the Framework. Did they use custom code to make this, or did I miss it in the documentation somehow?
I'm frankly quite surprised to see how challenging it's been to find a left nav example that works consistently and as expected in JQM.
I wound up copying code directly from the JQM docs, including grabbing their custom .js and .css scripts (which defines the .content-primary and .content-secondary classes, as well as the various #media queries which make the menu responsive).
The JQM docs do not use the "multi-page" format. Instead, each nav menu item links to a wholly separate URL (presumably prefetched into the DOM by adding data-prefetch="true" to the link), so each new page/URL must redefine the same nav menu over again.
This immediately makes my developer brain think "let's abstract the menu and include it on each page automatically". But how to 'include' the menu on each page without PHP (or other server-side language)? This is the problem I have yet to solve.
You may be able to call the $(document).bind('pageinit', function to manually inject your menu into the loading page by using javascript/jquery, but I have yet to figure out how to do this properly.
I'll keep you posted if/when I have a workable solution.
Actually this is not specific to jquery mobile, this is CSS3. You can check documentation here: http://www.css3.info/preview/media-queries/. Essentially what they do is specify style rules for different screen width using media query as shown in this example:
#media all and (min-width: 650px) { // you can define your width here
// style rules here
}
Are you talking about something like the left menu at http://jquerymobile.com/demos/1.3.0-beta.1/docs/demos/panels/panel-nav-form.html# ? Haven't played with it but it looks like these days it just takes
<div data-role="panel" data-position="left" data-position-fixed="false" data-display="reveal">

jQuery Mobile Popups and Dialogs

jQuery mobile 1.2 alpha introduces Popups while it already has a similar widget, called Dialogs. They both seem very similar in nature.
What are the technical differences between Popups and Dialogs?
What Popups can do (any practical usecase as example preferred) that is impossible with Dialogs?
They are quite different beast. Here is my opinion based on my limited experience.
Dialogues
Dialogues take over the page, they contain a fullscreen dark background to make the "dialog" appear to have replaced the page.
Any page can be presented as a dialog by adding the data-rel="dialog" attribute to the page anchor link.
Like pages, you can specify any page transition you want on the dialog by adding the data-transition attribute to the link.
Can be chained.
Popups
Displays within the current page, and are probably more similar to the functionality commonly referred to as modals or lightboxes.
Can't be chained.
Popups are probably more suited for alerts, tooltips, small yes/no ok/cancel messages, making a thumbnail popup into a larger image, small ajax forms(newsletter, login, post a comment) etc. Useful when you don't want to overload the page with information, and only want to reveal certain functionality to users when they need or request it.
Dialogues on the other hand could be used in situations where you need to convey a lot of information (terms and conditions acceptance screen, etc), or when you really want to emphasis an alert, menu, the choice a user has, etc. Dialogues kind of break the flow of a page so should be used more cautiously.
One neat feature of the popups is that they can be used as overlay panels, which could be used to create a menu that slides in from the side of the screen, not too dissimilar to the menu in the Facebooks iphone application.
At the end of the day, either could be used, and neither is right or wrong, a lot of it comes down to personal preference, and how you want your application to flow.
One important difference is Popups appear in the same page as an element, where as dialogue is a different page in all and the background is blank.

JQuery UI versus custom jquery widgets

I would like to add tabs and modal window widgets all over my website. Both widgets will vary in appearance depending on the page but functionality will be the same.
I found that JQuery UI provides both tabs and modal widgets. I also found various custom JQuery widgets such as modal window by Eric Martin http://www.ericmmartin.com/projects/simplemodal/ and tab menu by Soh Tanaka http://www.sohtanaka.com/web-design/simple-tabs-w-css-jquery/
I need an expert opinion on whether its better to use JQuery UI or custom JQuery Widgets.
Whichever you prefer. If you're building a website, you can just go with custom plugins. The advantage is that you can pick anything you like, anything that behaves in the exact way you had in mind.
However, if you're building a web application or you need loads of different widgets on a page, it's best to use jQuery UI or some other full widget framework. You can really benefit from the consistency, it will make your life much easier to get those different widgets interact with each other in a logical way, with the least possible coding. All widgets use consistent naming of properties, methods and events, you will spend less time reading the documentation and more time fleshing out your application. You can even use themeroller to make a custom theme to match the rest of your site, none of the widgets will look out-of-place from the rest.

Help with html select replacement

I hate default select control, that's because it can't be styled in IE using CSS.
This is why I developed a new select control from scratch, using HTML + CSS + JavaScript.
I did a great job in the past two days matching CSS and HTML together, but today I discovered a bug wich looks very hard for me to fix.
In IE 7, when I have tow controls on the same page, the one from top does not overlay the one from bottom.
See the image: coolrgb dot com/files/select-help.jpg
Download the demo page (HTML + CSS + Javascript): coolrgb dot com/files/select-help.zip
Please help me, this control looks so nice for me and I want to use it on all my projects from now on. This bug killed my hopes and lot of time.
Thank you.
If you give each control the same z-index, then you will not have control over the stacking order.
I would suggest modifying your control to behave more like a real SELECT element: only one can be open at a time, or losing focus causes it to close. Alternately, you can set a high z-index when the control has focus, and a lower one when it does not.
Another thing to look out for: try putting some other controls like radio, checkbox, and select under your control. You might find that IE also will not hover over those even if you give them a different z-index (as #grawity explained in his answer). This is why you'll typically see widget demos displayed on top of these elements, as shown here: http://jqueryui.com/demos/dialog/
A typical hack to fix this is to use an iframe, but that probably deserves a different question altogether.
Edit: After rereading the question, this answer now seems totally unrelated, but I'm keeping it here anyway.
Not really an answer, but an attempt to explain:
In Internet Explorer, <select> tags are implemented as simple windowed controls, while all other elements are windowless controls (this allows them to be styled). That's why these tags are always on top and don't follow the z-order rules. (The drop-down menu part must be styleable so it's a windowless control, and so it shows under the main part.)
In Firefox all elements are windowless, and in IE8 they should be too.

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