Monday, July 14, 2014

Fluid User Interface: PeopleTools 8.54 is Now Generally Available

Late in the day on July 11th, Oracle made the release of PeopleTools 8.54 generally available.

Here are the release notes on support.oracle.com.


Use the Cumulative feature overview to get a detailed list of the improvements for those parts of PeopleTools that you are interested in:





If you want to get started understanding how the Fluid User Interface works, click here.

Here are some interesting and useful things I have found in the Development Tools section of the Release Notes.

PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface (page 14)

PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface moves away from pixel-perfect page layout and provides greater flexibility with the enhanced use of cascading style sheets (CSS3), HTML5, and JavaScript. pages scale gracefully from large screen devices, such as laptops and desktops, to the reduced viewing space of tablets and Smartphones. An end user can interact with fluid pages using a conventional mouse and keyboard or using a touch interface, which is common on tablets and Smartphones. These new pages are device-independent and will operate on any certified device browser.  Mobile devices such as tablets and Smartphones include the ability for the user to change the page orientation (by turning the device) from Portrait (tall) to Landscape (wide). A responsive page will automatically adjust to fill the space appropriately. In Portrait mode, where width is limited, a grid that would normally display multiple columns might adjust to show the information row-by-row instead.

If you intend to provide fluid page access to desktop users, system administrators must enable Fluid Mode for the system, which entails reviewing only a few settings in the web profile and the PeopleTools Options page.

Mobile Application Platform (MAP) (page 18)

While MAP is similar in many ways to the PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface delivered with PeopleTools
8.54, there is a single major difference. That difference is that MAP reads and writes data through
RESTful web services that pass through the integration gateway and provide the communication layer
between MAP applications and the database. while the framework is built on REST services, developing and manipulating REST services is not required; the framework takes care of building the services in the background.

Navigation Bar (page 16)

The Navigation Bar is a new fluid structure that is always available as a dynamic window that slides out from the side of the page. On fluid-enabled systems, the PeopleSoft Navigation Bar will be available even on PeopleSoft classic pages.


Developing PeopleSoft Fluid User Interface Applications (26)

PeopleSoft Fluid applications are built in large part the same as you build a traditional or classic
PeopleSoft application, using the same general application development steps in Application Designer...
but when it comes to designing pages and configuring components, you depart somewhat from the
steps and techniques. Each of the properties dialog box for components, pages, and page controls have a separate Fluid tab, which displays the options for that definition or control if you are developing for fluid display.

Rather than Pixel Perfection Positioning of classic pages, to some extent, page layout for fluid pages consists of ensuring the field or control exists on the page in generally the right order. All of the other aspects of layout and positioning and appearance are controlled by CSS-based freeform style sheets.

Improved Definition Reference Search Functionality (27)
In Application Designer, when using the Find Definitions References feature for field and record
definitions, you can now search within a set of specific definition types.

Toolbar Buttons Provide Quicker Access to Page and Record
PeopleCode (28)


Page PeopleCode and record PeopleCode can be viewed with fewer clicks using the toolbar rather than the right-click pop-up menu.

No comments: