This topic covers creating screens, adding components, binding data to components and changing styles.

Overview

There are several stages to designing an application, as outlined in Building Applications. An application provides users with one or more screens, which they use to interact with data.

A screen is made up of:

• a dashboard: the empty screen and properties that you want to apply to the whole screen
• optionally, dashboard elements: these divide a dashboard and enable components in different parts of it to be bound to different data
• layouts: combinations of components, such as areas, fields, labels, cards, grids and charts, grouped together to create parts of the screen. Layouts start with container components:
  • areas: can contain any other component
  • forms: designed to contain fields and their labels
  • card-containers: designed to contain cards
• data-bound components: some components are designed to display data. These are:
  • graphs, charts and grids, which are based on views
  • form fields and cards: which are bound to stream attributes.

You can build up your own layouts from individual components. However, we recommend that you simply use ready-made layouts that you can drag from the palette onto a screen. Some layouts, called tiles, are specifically designed to resize and move components in response to changes in screen size and device form.

This topic explains how to:

• create screens; see Creating or Opening a Screen
• design screens using components provided in the palette; see Using Palettes and Themes
• use data to create components or bind data to existing components; see Showing Data on a Screen
• change the styling of components; see Styles and Formats
• provide menu options and navigation; see Adding a Menu Bar and Screen Toolbars and Menus.