I am developing an Application for the client and being a programmer, my usability skills are pretty basic. So I would appreciate if some of you can help me with some concerns. Your help is highly appreciated.
- The Usage of Popups:
The first concern is regarding usage of Popups. These are form based screens and there are editable grids. What is the best way to allow editing. Is it a good idea to open actionable modal popups for each of the grid. For instance if there are 5 grids in the page, I can open up popups for editing each of those individual grids or is there a better way of doing it.
Also Can I open other actionable popups from a popup?
- Data Management:
Is it a good idea to manage data in the Browser session? As already mentioned we have lot of forms and the user might have a lot of these forms open (in tabbed container), Is it a good idea to maintain lot of these data in the front end or just get data from the service layer when necessary.
- State Management:
In case of using a popup, the data changes made in the session are temporary. Only when the user decides to save the session, does the changes gets to the database. In this case, Is it a good idea to have multiple local cancel operations. For instance the user could just open one popup and change few things around and then open another popup and change some other thing.Now the user will go back and cancel changes made in the first popup alone. Then we will just cancel changes done at this popup, maintaining any subsequent changes done in other popups. The developer in me cringe at a requirement like this, since it unnecessarily complicates the state space.
- Direct Query:
Is it a good idea to query directly from the UI, for accomplishing the above requirement. Is it a good idea to query db directly from UI ever..