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About Form Applet Templates (Grid-Based)

Grid Layout applet Web templates, Siebel tags, and enhanced features in the Web Layout Editor allow you to modify form layout without having to directly modify the underlying applet Web templates.

Standard applet Web templates (not grid-based) use placeholder tags to define an applet's layout. You could use the Web Layout Editor in Siebel Tools to map controls to any of the available placeholders, but you cannot use Web Layout Editor to change the layout of the placeholders themselves. To change the layout of the placeholders in these templates, you have to directly modify the applet Web template file.

Grid Layout applet Web templates use a pair of Siebel tags (<swe:form-applet-layout> and </swe:form-applet-layout>) that do not use placeholder tags. Instead they serve as a single container for all controls in the main body of a form applet. These tags allow you to use the Web Layout Editor as a WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) design tool to configure the layout of form applets. In fact, this is the only way you can configure the layout of an applet based on a grid-based applet Web template.

The Grid Layout Web templates are:

• CCAppletFormGridLayout. This template may be used for form applets. See Figure 126.

  Figure 126.  Grid-Based Applet Web Template for Form Applets

• CCAppletPopupFormGridLayout. This template may be used for popup form applets. See Figure 127.

  Figure 127.  Grid-Based Applet Web Template for Popup Form Applets

Grid Layout applet Web templates consist of a body region and a header and footer region. The body region of the template is defined by the swe:form-applet-layout tag and contains no placeholder tags. However, the header and footer regions do use placeholder tags for buttons such as New and Save. You cannot edit the layout of header and footer regions using the grid layout features of the Web Layout editor.

The following list summarizes how grid-based applet Web templates differ from standard (not grid-based) applet Web templates:

• With grid-based templates, you can modify the layout of the form using Siebel Tools without having to modify the Web template itself.
• With grid-based templates, Labels and Controls behave as separate items in the Web Layout Editor. This allows you to place them independently in the applet layout. However, Labels and Controls are really a single object in the repository with one set of shared properties.
• Grid-based templates do not automatically compress empty space in a column.

You can modify the background colors of applets based on Grid Layout Web templates by modifying the appropriate selectors in the cascading style sheet, main.css.

• When the applet is the parent applet (the top applet on a view) modify the .AppletStyle1 selector as shown in the example below:

  /*Parent Applet Style*/

  .AppletStyle1{background-color : #f00000; color:#00f0ff; }

• When the applet is the child applet (not the top applet on the view) modify .AppletStyle3 selector as shown in the example below:

  /*Child Applet Style*/

  .AppletStyle3 { background-color : #f0f000; }

For more information about main.css, see Developing and Deploying Siebel eBusiness Applications.

Grid-based templates make configuring the layout of form applets much simpler than configuring the layout of applets based on standard (not grid-based) templates. Using Grid Layout templates makes the process of designing a form applet similar to working in other palette-based graphics design applications.

See About Grid Layout for more information about Grid Layout.