Working With the View in Browser Feature

During the page design process, you might want to periodically preview how your page looks in the browser. How your page appears in Application Designer at design time may look different when viewed online. This is particularly true for fluid pages, which do not follow the pixel perfect WYSIWYG paradigm of classic pages. With fluid pages, CSS determines how the page and how the page elements are displayed to the user. The physical placement of the page elements often has no bearing on how the fluid page will appear at run time. Therefore, you must either preview fluid pages from Application Designer or view them in a runtime browser session.

After you open either a fluid or classic page definition in Application Designer, you can select Layout, and then View in Browser, and then select a browser from the list of configured browsers to preview the page.

Limitations

The View in Browser feature provides an approximate idea of how your page will look. For the complete view of the page at run time, including any component settings, assign your page to a component and register the component to the portal registry structure using the Registration Wizard. Then, you can access the component and page in a browser online.

Note the following limitations on previewing pages from Application Designer:

  • Only page definitions as a standalone definition can be previewed. Therefore, none of the component properties or settings are available as part of a page preview.

  • No PeopleCode or JavaScript is run during page preview.

    For example, flex grid column headings will not be aligned properly because this relies on JavaScript. In addition, scrolling enabled in Application Designer will not function since this also relies on JavaScript.

  • The content of an HTML area that is populated dynamically via the value of a record field (that is, via PeopleCode) is not displayed. However, the content of an HTML area that is populated statically via a constant value is displayed.

  • Application data such as high-level keys, related display data, and grid or scroll data is not displayed.

  • Most page controls are inoperable.

  • In addition, for fluid pages, the following limitations apply:

    • You can preview the following page types only: Standard, Subpage, and Secondary. For other fluid page types, the View in Browser menu item displays this message: (Not available for this page type).

    • Any styles applied via PeopleCode or JavaScript will not be in effect.

    • Pages are previewed in extra large form factor only; styles and overrides specific to this form factor will be applied. However, form factor overrides for any other form factor will be ignored.

    • An empty fluid banner is displayed at the top of the page for standard page types only. Since the component definition includes all the settings that determine what is displayed in the fluid banner, none of this information is available in the page definition during page preview.

    • Secondary page types are not displayed in a modal window; the content is previewed in a full screen.

  • In addition, for classic pages, the portal wrapper (the portal header and footer defined in PeopleTools branding) is not displayed.