WEBIX BLOG

Hey guys, let us check today what Webix offers to make our lives easier during app navigation. I bet that there’s something worth a closer look.

Since the launch of the library its users had a standard Menu at their disposal with the possibility of  placing items horizontally or vertically (too simple). But not very long time ago the developers went further and ended up with two handsome widgets created with user-friendly navigation in mind – Sidemenu and Sidebar.

So, let’s explore the widgets’ functionality to find out the use cases that are more suitable for each of them.

Basically, Sidebar can be initialized on the page with the following code:

And you get: 

Live demo

JavaScript Table is the most popular widget of Webix UI framework. It is fast, flexible and can be used in many different scenarios. By default, it shows only a text content in its cells. Nevertheless, you can use cell templating to show a more complex content in the cells of DataTable. Icons, buttons, and even other widgets can be used as cell templates.

Let’s look how it can be done.

Checkbox and Radio buttons

The most common use-case is the adding of a checkbox into a cell of a DataTable. It is so common, that we have added a ready-to-use shortcut. Just write the cell template as follows:

and you will get a fully-functional checkbox input.

Webix has also developed an in-house solution for managing large volumes of aggregated data in business web apps: the JavaScript Pivot Table. This tool analyzes and displays data in a tabular format.

Unlike the regular menus that you can create using the Menu Component, Mega Menus are big and wide enough to allow you place other components and widgets within them. Such a type of menus is widely used on the online shopping websites since it’s pretty easy to use them for navigation purposes.

Here’s an example of how this menu works:

The demo of the final mega menu with its source code is here.

In this article, we’ll create our own mega menu with Webix in a few easy steps.

As we know, web app development is a complex process that, on the one hand, consists of laborious work at the backend and, on the other hand, includes plenty of efforts while creating a nice-looking and responsive UI.

If you want to optimize the construction of your web applications, you need to find the best option for organizing your work with data as well as a fast and powerful js library for drawing app interface.

This variant can be implemented by using OData, an open data protocol for building RESTful API’s, and by adapting Webix UI library to its rules of requesting and modifying data.

OData’s goal is to enable a broad access to data regardless of the way it is stored. It allows requesting and updating resources via HTTP commands and provides an entire query language directly in the URL.

Well, if you are reading this post, you probably know a lot about Webix. If suddenly no, you can find more info here.

Kanban boards allow visualizing the workflow in an easy and intuitive way. And Webix has a tool that allows you to create your own Kanban Board.

There’s already a well written guide that describes how you can use the Webix Kanban Board widget. This time we’ll take a look at some tips and tricks you can use to customize the existing project management application.

Splitting the Columns

First of all, the basics. Here’s how you can create a simple Kanban Board:

And here’s the result:

Webix version 2.4 brings you a new UI component that allows creating portal layouts in an easy and intuitive way. Portlet component can be dragged over the page and swapped with other portlets. This behaviour allows you to rearrange your web page elements the way you want. Let’s take a look at the basics of portlet usage.

Portlets Basics

You can create a basic portlet in the same way as other Webix UI components. Just set “portlet” as the view property value. The body property defines the portlet content:

By arranging portlets into rows and columns, you can create the required layout which can be easily reorganized if necessary:

The result is shown below:

Starting with version 2.4, Webix provides you with a new way of user interaction improvement. Validation Messages can be pretty useful in case you want to make sure that users will fill in all your web forms properly.

Let’s take a look at how it works. Here’s an example of a registration form:

You can check the Form documentation page if you want to get more details of form creation with Webix.

Ace is a handy JavaScript code editor. It combines the possibilities and behavior of popular editors like Sublime, Vim and TextMate. Ace is maintained as the primary editor for Cloud9 IDE and is the successor of the Mozilla Skywriter (Bespin) project. You can build Ace into your web page or app with ease.

And now it is possible to use Ace Editor with Webix UI.

TL; DR Grab the final package from https://github.com/webix-hub/webix-firebase

Dynamic Web

Not so long ago web apps were slow and phlegmatic. The whole page had to be reloaded to update information. AJAX has only slightly improved this situation. Now we update separate blocks instead of reloading the whole page. Hardly had we got used to this technique, when a new web transformation appeared on the scene. It is dynamical web, where the content of pages updates by itself.

Now you can find such elements on Facebook or Twitter pages, for example. Data are changed there without our participation. As soon as someone has added a comment or re-tweeted the post, the changes are reflected on the page immediately.

There are several technologies behind dynamical web. WebSockets are the most important of them. You can read how to use them with Webix here. However, web sockets present a very low level of abstraction. Fortunately, it’s possible to get all the benefits of dynamic updates without diving so deeply into the details of data synchronization. There are several great solutions created by web enthusiasts. They allow avoiding difficulties and creating cool dynamic apps.