The Breathalyser, Courier, Sales Force and other example projects have been chosen to demonstrate how to design and run a project with Mobile Data Anywhere. These projects are provided with the Mobile Data Anywhere Designer to be used alongside these tutorials. These and other example projects are typically installed into one of these locations:
C:\Program Files\Mobile Data Studio
C:\Program Files (x86)\Mobile Data Studio
Download the Mobile Data Anywhere Designer installer from our Downloads page. Once the file has downloaded, open the installer by double clicking on it. The installer will guide you through the process for setting up Mobile Data Anywhere Designer on your computer.
A new blank project can be created by opening the
File menu
and selecting
New Project
. Provide a unique name for
the new project and select where you would like to save the file to. The project will be saved with a '.ppc' file
extension.
To open an existing project, open the File menu and select
Open project
. Select the project file that you would like to open - a valid project file should have a '.ppc' file extension.
To start a new project using the contents of an existing project, open the existing project using the steps above.
Once the project has been opened, open the
File menu
and select
Save Project As...
and provide a new, unique name for the new project. Click
Save
and the old project will automatically be closed and the new project will be opened.
If you have created a new project, the Project Properties window will appear, prompting for more information about the new project, including a Title; this is covered in more detail below. Project Properties will not appear when opening existing projects.
Once you have a project open, the Project Window will appear with two icons:
Step 1 Describe the project with Properties Related Tutorials: Project Properties (below) |
Step 2 Design projects on Windows desktop or laptop PC Related Tutorials: The Design Window (below) Adding Simple Points Design - Adding Points Design - Adding Points Continued Adding Point Functions |
These two icons provide access to the key functional areas of Mobile Data Anywhere Designer: configuring and designing a project:
Each area will be covered by these tutorials. You can also access these functions via theProject menu:
The Project Properties window opens as soon as you create a new project. For existing projects, you can open it from the Project window or Project menu.
The Information tab describes the project. Only the Title is used directly to identify the project on the mobile device.
The Options tab provides customised properties for each project running in Mobile Data Anywhere on the mobile device and sets up the presentation of sessions in the Session Window on the mobile device; see options below.
Session List Columns is an important Option and enables the selection of a point/s from which data will be presented in the Session Window on the mobile device to identify particular sessions. In Windows Mobile the columns on the mobile device can be widened to see data, and data can be sorted by tapping the top of the column/s, the width of columns is set when the project is closed. Android and Apple iOS devices present less session columns of data and do not support alphanumeric sort of sessions; however, key information to identify sessions can be presented via Session List Columns. The Formatter point can be used to expand detail in Apple iOS, gathering data from multiple points. Default is time and date of session creation.
Session List Columns can be hidden from the session list view by adding brackets around the column. This allows the column to be
used as a data-only point, such as for the
Javascript point
. The example below shows how to hide the point named
Edit2
:
Edit1;(Edit2);Edit3;
The Visual Style tab allows the visual style of the project to be modified (see below). Mobile Data Anywhere Designer provides a default colour scheme and graphics set, but these can be replaced with a custom design. Custom visual styles consist of a set of colours, fonts and graphics that are used to display pages, and are stored within the project file. The default Header image in Mobile Data Anywhere Designer is 1,280 pixels wide to cater for most Tablets in both portrait and landscape mode.
When loading over the default graphics, ensure the JPG or Bitmap image used for the page Header image is at least 480 pixels wide (but may be up to 1300 pixels wide for use in Landscape view, and on Tablets, desktop and notebook PCs), and between 40 and 60 pixels high so it fills the required area on screen. The page Background pattern will be tiled vertically down the page, and can be any width and height. Below are 480 pixels wide Header and Background JPG images previously used in the Sales Force project. Now, in Mobile Data Anywhere Designer, the Sales Force images are 1,300 pixels wide to support use on Tablets in both portrait and landscape mode.
Licence enables presentation of the licensing conditions for the project, see below. An important facility for commercial developers of Mobile Data Anywhere projects for sale. Lock Project secures a projects design so that it can neither be seen nor amended. There are a number of cautionary steps to Lock a project, most importantly, a separate copy of the unlocked project must be retained by the author. While one of the features of Mobile Data Anywhere is the ease with which projects can be amended, sometimes it may be desirable to prevent amendments by parties other than the author/developer.
Next, double clicking the Design icon in the Project window causes the Design Window to appear. A project will be empty to begin with , but once created, this is what the design area will look like. Features of the three panelled Design Window are:
Clicking the Add Page button on the Design window (at the bottom) causes a dialog box to appear prompting for details. The Caption for the new page - " Location and Test " is entered. Avoid using long page captions, as they don't wrap down a line (or reduce Page Caption font size via Visual Style). If required, Introductory Text can be added. The check box control for 'This page can be reached with Previous/Next' is set by default, when unchecked the page is 'hidden' and not part of the normal navigation, and can only be reached via Link points (see page 4).
The Guidance tab in the dialog box can be used to enter information to guide or 'help' the user of the project page in the field. If guidance support is provided with the project points described below, it can be helpful to also copy it onto the page guidance field for quick reference. The Guidance area on a page can be accessed by a tap on the top of the page, and tap page to return. Text cannot be added to the Guidance area on the mobile device, it must be added or amended in the Project Design phase. Guidance can be formatted by a limited subset of HTML, for bold (b), underline (u) and headings (h1); headings reflect the Visual Style for page Title.
Clicking Add Point button on the Design window (at the bottom, or right mouse click with cursor in right panel) causes the lists of 24 point functions to appear within the Add New Point window. While all of these point functions are supported in Windows Mobile devices, some are not supported on Android and Apple devices, please see note below.
Clicking one of the Point Types causes the appearance of a Point Properties dialog box, see below. Point Properties provides three tabs: