Templates for multiple layouts

What’s the idea?

Templates with placeholders can save you a lot of time when you create dashboards or reports.

The Documentation part of the TARGIT Community holds several articles and video tutorials on this subject if you haven't used templates or placeholders before.

When you’re comfortable with the concept of templates with placeholders in TARGIT you can take it a step further, and actually make a template that will be prepared for reusing data objects across several layouts.

(if you’re not familiar with layouts in TARGIT either, here a video tutorial explaining the concept).

In one process you will be able to create:

• A dashboard
• A design for tablet devices like iPads (landscape and portrait)
• Another design for mobile devices like iPhone (landscape and portrait)
• And finally, the first pages of a paginated report.

This can be a huge time saver that can bring down development time and at the same time offer great flexibility to your end users, who will be able to access the same information on a platform of their choice.

How to get started?

First you create a new dashboard and make a “normal” template that could look like this:

The template contains sample menus, sample header and footer including logo, and 5 placeholders ready for data.

Now let's take it a step further.

 

Layout templates fast and easy

Now we can turn our attention to the layouts tab on the left hand side:

Currently we only have one layout for Dashoard.

Let’s duplicate this layout:

Now we have an exact copy of the dashboard layout.
Let’s make 4 duplicates ready and configure them for different purposes.

Now the Layout tab should look something like this:

 

Tablet device landscape

1. Right click the first new layout and rename it to ipad landscape
   
   
2. Now pick Page settings from the Design ribbon
   
   Change page size to tablet, orientation to Landscape and tick the box saying resize objects to fit page
   
   
   

 

 

3. There is less space on a tablet device than on your laptop, so let’s simplify the dashboard - remove the 2 leftmost objects and resize the rest to they fill out the page
   (the 2 leftmost we can place on the tablet device portrait layout – then the end user can just toggle their device between portrait and landscape and get the same information as the dashboard layout)
   
   Now the Layout looks like this:
   
   Finally right click again on the layout and pick Device visibility
   
   
   Tick the box saying designed for Tablet

 

Portrait version

Repeat the process with the next layout (just make it portrait for tablets).

In this layout you just keep the two leftmost placeholders and resize them to fit the canvas.

Now you tablet portrait layout should look like this:

Use the same methodology with the phone layouts using the 2 remaining copied layouts – keep the 2 leftmost placeholders on the portrait version and keep the rest on the landscape version.

Now we are ready for making the Report layout.

 

 

The Report Layout

Now we choose to create a new report layout – using the middle icon in the top of the layout tab

The dialogue doesn’t need any change – it’s A4 format in portrait format – just click OK

 

 

Now we need to copy and paste the 2 leftmost objects from the dashboard layout to the new A4-portrait layout.

Just using CTRL-C and CTRL-V and with a bit of resizing we create this first page:
(note: only extra adjustment is the automatic page numbering in the footer – the rest is copied from the dashboard layout).

On the right hand side I right click my [Page 1] and choose to duplicate this page:

Now we copy and paste the 3 remaining objects and fit them into the new page like this:

That’s it – now we save this as a template and it’s ready to use.

When you use it – every placeholder where you add a data object will be replaced in all your different layouts – and you will experience the “magic” of building a dashboard and suddenly have layouts ready for ipad and iphone + the first 2 pages of a paginated report!