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About Browser-Specific Mappings


Different browsers can have different associated capabilities as defined in the Web Browser Administration view. Differences in the abilities of particular browsers to use features such as frames and JavaScript may necessitate different applet layouts for different classes of browsers. The browser group-specific mappings feature allows this kind of browser-specific layout customization.

A Target Browser combo box appears in the toolbar when the View > Toolbars > Configuration Context option is activated. The first item in the combo box is Target Browser Config, which activates a dialog box for selecting browsers.

The Target Browser Configuration dialog box lists all of the browsers in the Available browsers selection box at the upper left. You select the ones you are interested in working with by moving the names of these browsers into the Selected browsers for layout editing section at right. You can also view various features of the selected browser in the Capability Name and Value box in the lower half of the dialog box. The boxes in the dialog box include the following:

  • Available browsers: List of available browser groups.
  • Selected browsers for layout editing: Specifies which browser groups are affected by subsequent layout editing in the Web Layout Editor.
  • Capability Name and Value: Specifies what capabilities or properties the currently selected virtual browser group has.

The target browser group determines how conditional template tags are expressed in the layout editor.

Inside the template are SWE:IF tags that conditionally execute blocks of code. (Markup is included.) At edit time you see the applet the way it would show up for the particular browser you have chosen. At run time, the conditional sections in the template are executed appropriately for the current browser.

For example, a user may associate a template to a view that contains the following tags:

<swe:if condition="Web Engine User Agent, TestCapability, 'FrameSupport:TRUE'">

<swe:frameset htmlAttr="cols='33%,66%'' border='1' frameborder='Yes'">

<swe:frame type="Applet" htmlAttr="marginheight='0' marginwidth='0' scrolling='Auto'">

<swe:applet id="101" hintText="Applet" var="Parent">

<swe:this property="FormattedHtml"/>

</swe:applet>

</swe:frame>

</swe:frameset>

</swe:if>

If the user opens a view in the Web Layout Editor when his or her Target Browser is set to IE 5.0, the user will see a placeholder for the applet in the frame with an underlying identifier of 101. The user can then drag and drop a particular applet to the placeholder. This is because IE 5.0 has a FrameSupport capability with a value of TRUE. However, if the user's Target Browser is set to IE 1.5, he or she will simply not see the placeholder in the layout editor since the FrameSupport capability for IE 1.5 is set to FALSE.

Configuring Siebel eBusiness Applications