Best Practices for Creating Mashups and Masters
Use the following best practices while creating Mashups and Masters.
Use Master Mashups for Consistency in the User Interface Design
Start by determining the basic look and feel for your application and then create a Master Mashup. Use Master Mashups to standardize the layout and display of items, such as logos, menus, titles, headers, footers, and sidebars for your Mashups.
Design Separate Mashup and Master Pages
Design separate Mashup and Master pages for different viewing devices. Remember that the user workflows are different depending on the screen sizes.
Define the Parameters for a Mashup
You can define any number of parameters for the Mashup. These parameters are used to pass data when a Mashup is embedded in another Mashup, or when navigating from one Mashup to another. These parameters become properties that can be used as binding sources or targets when they are called from other Mashups.
When a Mashup is loaded, and user did not pass all the data required by the Mashup, services are called to get this data. To minimize the number of services being called, it is recommended that the Mashups calling these parameters should pass all the data required by the containing Mashup.
Display the Sequential Tasks to Users
If you want the user to complete tasks in a sequence or have a workflow that should be performed in a certain order, use one of the following approaches:
• Set the property called Visibile for widgets to control the visibility of widgets. This property displays and enables widgets for required steps.
• Use dynamic Contained Mashups that display and remove the embedded Mashups after the user completes the steps in the required sequence.
Customize the Mashup to Display Selected Properties
The Property Display widget enables you to visualize a Thing property set based on their data type. A Thing property set contains all the properties and the Property Display widget displays the property set.
You can configure the Property Display widget to display only certain properties of the Mashup.
Additionally, individual properties that are retrieved from the same getPropertyValues service can be bound to the Value Display and other visualization widgets.
Event Log When the Mashup Loads
When you view a Mashup, you can add &__trace to the URL to see the detailed log of all the events that are executed when the Mashup loads. This also helps during troubleshooting.
Add &__trace to the end of the Mashup URL as shown:
<Mashup_URL>&__trace
Refresh Data on Mashups
You can automatically refresh data on Mashups. Use the GetProperties service.