Home > Articles > Mobile Application Development & Programming

XPages Mobile Application Development

This chapter focuses on best practices and design patterns for XPages Mobile Application Development. So even if you are familiar with building mobile applications with XPages, this chapter contains some discussion that you will find interesting.
This chapter is from the book

The mobile features from the XPages Extension Library were promoted into the core XPages runtime in Domino 9.0. This reflects the importance of mobile support in application development as mobile devices (phones and tablets) move to outsell desktop systems and are becoming the norm for how people access web applications. XPages has implemented a Mobile Web Development strategy—that is, it uses web technologies to provide mobile access to your applications. Mobile devices feature powerful web browsers; however, the web interface you have built for desktop clients just won’t cut it for mobile clients. If you have ever accessed the full version of a website from a mobile device, you will have experienced first-hand the type of problems encountered when there is no mobile version of a site. These include

  • Limited resources: Device processor power, memory, and network bandwidth all tend to be limited on a mobile device.
  • User experience: Users have particular expectations when using a mobile device—for example, fast response times, navigation to most important features, minimal data entry, UI adapts to device orientation, and many more.
  • Limited functionality: Users typically need only a subset of functionality and expect applications to reuse functionality from other applications on their mobile device.

The XPages Extension Library book provides an introductory description of the XPages mobile controls and the pattern to be used to develop a Create, Read, Update, Delete (CRUD) mobile sample application. The approach this chapter takes is to focus on best practices and design patterns for XPages Mobile Application Development. So even if you are familiar with building mobile applications with XPages, this chapter contains some discussion that you will find interesting. While writing the second edition of this book, Domino 9.0.1 had just been released. It includes some important enhancements for mobile developers, which will be covered in this chapter. For an excellent description of the best practices for Mobile Web Applications, visit www.w3.org/TR/mwabp/. Some of the best practices outlined in this document are referred to later in the chapter. Be sure to download the chp14ed2.nsf file provided online for this book to run through the exercises throughout this chapter. You can access these files at www.ibmpressbooks.com/title/9780133373370.

Getting Started with Mobile Application Development

Start with a simple XPage that displays the browser User Agent string. This enables you to detect which device is accessing your application. When you preview the XPage shown in Listing 14.1 in a browser, it displays the User Agent string for your browser, which for Firefox version 18.02 is Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64; rv:18.0) Gecko/20100101 Firefox/18.0.

Listing 14.1 Display User Agent

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xp:view xmlns:xp="http://www.ibm.com/xsp/core"
       style="padding-top:20.0px;padding-right:10.0px;padding-left:20.0px">
       <h3>Mobile XPages Applications</h3>
       <xp:br></xp:br>
       User Agent:&#160;
       <xp:text escape="true" id="computedField1"
              value="#{javascript:context.getUserAgent().getUserAgent()}"
              style="color:rgb(128,0,0)">
       </xp:text>
</xp:view>

As I write this, I’m using my home wireless network—so now I can enter the URL for this page into the Safari browser on my iPhone, and I can see the page rendered there. The User Agent string displayed is

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 6_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWeb-
Kit/536.26 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/6.0 Mobile/
10B143 Safari/8536.25

Figure 14.1 shows how the page displays on an iPhone.

Figure 14.1

Figure 14.1 iPhone User Agent

Straight away I can see problems:

  • Typing a URL on my iPhone is painful; I don’t want to have to do a lot of typing using this device.
  • I need to pinch and zoom to see the text in the browser. By default I’m seeing the full page with some tiny text at the top, which is not readable.
  • This is going to slow down my development if I have to keep switching between my development machine and device to test my changes.
  • What if I don’t have an iPhone, an iPad, or an Android device?

The first thing to know is that you don’t need a device to get started with Mobile Application Development. There are a number of alternative options to testing on a real device:

  • Using a device emulator, these are typically part of a mobile platform SDK and are available for Mac, Android, Microsoft, and Blackberry devices.
  • You can modify the User Agent in your desktop browser.

Most of the demonstrations in this chapter use the technique of overriding the User Agent your desktop browser sends with each request. User Agent spoofing doesn’t provide 100 percent fidelity with the actual device but is a quick way to get your application built before you begin testing on real devices. The remainder of this chapter uses the Safari and Chrome browsers to emulate Apple and Android devices, respectively.

Safari Browser

The Windows versions of the Safari browser are available from the Apple support site. The WebKit engine used by the Safari for Windows browser is similar to the one on the Apple iPhone and iPad, so this browser is a good option for basic emulation of the Apple mobile devices. Use the following steps to override the User Agent string sent by the browser:

  1. If you do not have menus enabled by default, do so via the Show Menu Bar from the General Safari Settings toolbar drop-down.
  2. Open Preferences and go to the Advanced tab.
  3. Select the option to Show Develop menu in menu bar.
  4. Select the User Agent override you want to use from the Develop -> User Agent menu.

Figure 14.2 shows the Safari User Agent choices. You can now select one of these. If you access the XPage in the Safari browser, the page displays the appropriate User Agent string.

Figure 14.2

Figure 14.2 Safari User Agent choices

For example, I selected Safari iOS 4.3.3—iPhone, and the XPage displayed the following User Agent:

Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_3_3 like Mac OS X; en-us)
AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/
8J2 Safari/6533.18.5

Chrome Browser

The Chrome browser provides similar functionality as follows:

  1. Go to the Tools menu and select Developer tools.
  2. Select the Settings (cogged wheel) icon in the bottom-right corner of the Developer tools panel.
  3. Select the Overrides tab.

Figure 14.3 shows the Chrome developer tools Overrides tab. You can override the User Agent and also other settings like the device metrics and orientation. The device metrics and orientation and useful for giving you that immediate feedback on how your page will be rendered on the device.

Figure 14.3

Figure 14.3 Chrome Developer tools Overrides tab

Firefox Browser

There is an add-on for FireFox called User Agent Switcher (addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/user-agent-switcher/), which provides the equivalent functionality. One nice feature of this add-on includes the capability to define your own User Agent string.

User Agent Device Detection

Detecting that your application is being accessed using a mobile device is important because it allows you to use server-side logic to adapt the content for the requesting client. It is preferable to do the adaptation on the server-side because this will improve the user experience and prevent the transfer of unnecessary data. The User Agent is typically used to detect the device in use. Listing 14.2 shows an example of how to detect if the device is an iPhone, iPad, Android, or BlackBerry device.

Listing 14.2 User Agent Device Detection

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xp:view xmlns:xp="http://www.ibm.com/xsp/core"
       style="padding-top:20.0px;padding-right:10.0px;padding-left:20.0px">
       <h3>Mobile XPages Applications</h3>
       <xp:br></xp:br>
       User Agent:&#160;
       <xp:text escape="true" id="computedField1"
              value="#{javascript:context.getUserAgent().getUserAgent()}"
              style="color:rgb(128,0,0)">
       </xp:text>
       <xp:br></xp:br>
       Device:&#160;
       <xp:text escape="true" id="computedField2"
              style="color:rgb(128,0,0)">
              <xp:this.value>
<![CDATA[#{javascript:var ua = context.getUserAgent().getUserAgent();
if (ua.indexOf("iPhone") > -1) {
       return "iPhone";
} else if (ua.indexOf("iPad") > -1) {
       return "iPad";
} else if (ua.indexOf("Android") > -1) {
       return "Android";
} else if (ua.indexOf("BlackBerry") > -1) {
       return "BlackBerry";
} else {
       return "Unknown";
}}]]>
              </xp:this.value>
       </xp:text>
</xp:view>

Given the large number of devices in use and that new devices come to the market frequently, this type of coding can become complex. The best practice for mobile applications is to use broader device classification to simplify the process of adapting your content. For example, you might want to generate different content for mobile phones versus tablet devices. In Domino 9.0.1, a new managed bean called the deviceBean has been added to the XPages runtime to simplify this process and allow you to implement a device classification strategy.

Device Bean

The Device Bean is used to identify the most common mobile and tablet devices—that is, Android; Apple iPhone or iPad; Blackberry; or Windows Mobile devices. The heavy lifting of parsing the User Agent string is handled for you. The most commonly used methods are deviceBean.isMobile() and deviceBean.isTablet(). For tablet devices, the method deviceBean.isMobile()returns false, which means you often see the two values being OR’d to determine if any mobile device is used. Listing 14.3 shows a list of the values available from the Device Bean.

Listing 14.3 DeviceBean

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<xp:view xmlns:xp="http://www.ibm.com/xsp/core">
<style>.desc{position:absolute;left:20em;color:blue;}</style>

<h3>DeviceBean Properties</h3>
deviceBean.isMobile=<xp:text value="#{javascript:deviceBean.
isMobile()}"/>

<span class="desc">Identifies a device as a mobile device.</span><br/>
deviceBean.isTablet=<xp:text value="#{javascript:deviceBean.
isTablet()}"/>

<span class="desc">Identifies a device as a tablet device.</span><br/>
deviceBean.isIphone=<xp:text value="#{javascript:deviceBean.
isIphone()}"/>

<span class="desc">Identifies a device as an iPhone.</span><br/>
deviceBean.isIpad=<xp:text value="#{javascript:deviceBean.isIpad()}"/>

<span class="desc">Identifies a device as an iPad.</span><br/>
deviceBean.getVersion('ipad')=<xp:text value="#{javascript:deviceBean.
getVersion('ipad')}"/>

<span class="desc">Version of iPad.</span><br/>
deviceBean.isAndroid=<xp:text value="#{javascript:deviceBean.
isAndroid()}"/>

<span class="desc">Identifies a device as an Android device.
</span><br/>
deviceBean.isBlackberry=<xp:text value="#{javascript:deviceBean.
isBlackberry()}"/>

<span class="desc">Identifies a device as a Blackberry device.
</span><br/>
deviceBean.isWindows=<xp:text value="#{javascript:deviceBean.
isWindows()}"/>

<span class="desc">Identifies a device as a Windows Mobile device.
</span><br/>

</xp:view>

Figure 14.4 shows the values that are displayed when accessing this page with the User Agent set to that of an iPad.

Figure 14.4

Figure 14.4 iPad Device Bean Values

Now we have an easy to use technique to identify that a mobile or tablet device is accessing our application we can use this information to adapt the presentation of our application to a form that is suitable for the device being used. The design pattern used to present content suitable for use in mobile applications is the Single Page Application pattern and this is the topic for the next section.

InformIT Promotional Mailings & Special Offers

I would like to receive exclusive offers and hear about products from InformIT and its family of brands. I can unsubscribe at any time.

Overview


Pearson Education, Inc., 221 River Street, Hoboken, New Jersey 07030, (Pearson) presents this site to provide information about products and services that can be purchased through this site.

This privacy notice provides an overview of our commitment to privacy and describes how we collect, protect, use and share personal information collected through this site. Please note that other Pearson websites and online products and services have their own separate privacy policies.

Collection and Use of Information


To conduct business and deliver products and services, Pearson collects and uses personal information in several ways in connection with this site, including:

Questions and Inquiries

For inquiries and questions, we collect the inquiry or question, together with name, contact details (email address, phone number and mailing address) and any other additional information voluntarily submitted to us through a Contact Us form or an email. We use this information to address the inquiry and respond to the question.

Online Store

For orders and purchases placed through our online store on this site, we collect order details, name, institution name and address (if applicable), email address, phone number, shipping and billing addresses, credit/debit card information, shipping options and any instructions. We use this information to complete transactions, fulfill orders, communicate with individuals placing orders or visiting the online store, and for related purposes.

Surveys

Pearson may offer opportunities to provide feedback or participate in surveys, including surveys evaluating Pearson products, services or sites. Participation is voluntary. Pearson collects information requested in the survey questions and uses the information to evaluate, support, maintain and improve products, services or sites, develop new products and services, conduct educational research and for other purposes specified in the survey.

Contests and Drawings

Occasionally, we may sponsor a contest or drawing. Participation is optional. Pearson collects name, contact information and other information specified on the entry form for the contest or drawing to conduct the contest or drawing. Pearson may collect additional personal information from the winners of a contest or drawing in order to award the prize and for tax reporting purposes, as required by law.

Newsletters

If you have elected to receive email newsletters or promotional mailings and special offers but want to unsubscribe, simply email information@informit.com.

Service Announcements

On rare occasions it is necessary to send out a strictly service related announcement. For instance, if our service is temporarily suspended for maintenance we might send users an email. Generally, users may not opt-out of these communications, though they can deactivate their account information. However, these communications are not promotional in nature.

Customer Service

We communicate with users on a regular basis to provide requested services and in regard to issues relating to their account we reply via email or phone in accordance with the users' wishes when a user submits their information through our Contact Us form.

Other Collection and Use of Information


Application and System Logs

Pearson automatically collects log data to help ensure the delivery, availability and security of this site. Log data may include technical information about how a user or visitor connected to this site, such as browser type, type of computer/device, operating system, internet service provider and IP address. We use this information for support purposes and to monitor the health of the site, identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents and appropriately scale computing resources.

Web Analytics

Pearson may use third party web trend analytical services, including Google Analytics, to collect visitor information, such as IP addresses, browser types, referring pages, pages visited and time spent on a particular site. While these analytical services collect and report information on an anonymous basis, they may use cookies to gather web trend information. The information gathered may enable Pearson (but not the third party web trend services) to link information with application and system log data. Pearson uses this information for system administration and to identify problems, improve service, detect unauthorized access and fraudulent activity, prevent and respond to security incidents, appropriately scale computing resources and otherwise support and deliver this site and its services.

Cookies and Related Technologies

This site uses cookies and similar technologies to personalize content, measure traffic patterns, control security, track use and access of information on this site, and provide interest-based messages and advertising. Users can manage and block the use of cookies through their browser. Disabling or blocking certain cookies may limit the functionality of this site.

Do Not Track

This site currently does not respond to Do Not Track signals.

Security


Pearson uses appropriate physical, administrative and technical security measures to protect personal information from unauthorized access, use and disclosure.

Children


This site is not directed to children under the age of 13.

Marketing


Pearson may send or direct marketing communications to users, provided that

  • Pearson will not use personal information collected or processed as a K-12 school service provider for the purpose of directed or targeted advertising.
  • Such marketing is consistent with applicable law and Pearson's legal obligations.
  • Pearson will not knowingly direct or send marketing communications to an individual who has expressed a preference not to receive marketing.
  • Where required by applicable law, express or implied consent to marketing exists and has not been withdrawn.

Pearson may provide personal information to a third party service provider on a restricted basis to provide marketing solely on behalf of Pearson or an affiliate or customer for whom Pearson is a service provider. Marketing preferences may be changed at any time.

Correcting/Updating Personal Information


If a user's personally identifiable information changes (such as your postal address or email address), we provide a way to correct or update that user's personal data provided to us. This can be done on the Account page. If a user no longer desires our service and desires to delete his or her account, please contact us at customer-service@informit.com and we will process the deletion of a user's account.

Choice/Opt-out


Users can always make an informed choice as to whether they should proceed with certain services offered by InformIT. If you choose to remove yourself from our mailing list(s) simply visit the following page and uncheck any communication you no longer want to receive: www.informit.com/u.aspx.

Sale of Personal Information


Pearson does not rent or sell personal information in exchange for any payment of money.

While Pearson does not sell personal information, as defined in Nevada law, Nevada residents may email a request for no sale of their personal information to NevadaDesignatedRequest@pearson.com.

Supplemental Privacy Statement for California Residents


California residents should read our Supplemental privacy statement for California residents in conjunction with this Privacy Notice. The Supplemental privacy statement for California residents explains Pearson's commitment to comply with California law and applies to personal information of California residents collected in connection with this site and the Services.

Sharing and Disclosure


Pearson may disclose personal information, as follows:

  • As required by law.
  • With the consent of the individual (or their parent, if the individual is a minor)
  • In response to a subpoena, court order or legal process, to the extent permitted or required by law
  • To protect the security and safety of individuals, data, assets and systems, consistent with applicable law
  • In connection the sale, joint venture or other transfer of some or all of its company or assets, subject to the provisions of this Privacy Notice
  • To investigate or address actual or suspected fraud or other illegal activities
  • To exercise its legal rights, including enforcement of the Terms of Use for this site or another contract
  • To affiliated Pearson companies and other companies and organizations who perform work for Pearson and are obligated to protect the privacy of personal information consistent with this Privacy Notice
  • To a school, organization, company or government agency, where Pearson collects or processes the personal information in a school setting or on behalf of such organization, company or government agency.

Links


This web site contains links to other sites. Please be aware that we are not responsible for the privacy practices of such other sites. We encourage our users to be aware when they leave our site and to read the privacy statements of each and every web site that collects Personal Information. This privacy statement applies solely to information collected by this web site.

Requests and Contact


Please contact us about this Privacy Notice or if you have any requests or questions relating to the privacy of your personal information.

Changes to this Privacy Notice


We may revise this Privacy Notice through an updated posting. We will identify the effective date of the revision in the posting. Often, updates are made to provide greater clarity or to comply with changes in regulatory requirements. If the updates involve material changes to the collection, protection, use or disclosure of Personal Information, Pearson will provide notice of the change through a conspicuous notice on this site or other appropriate way. Continued use of the site after the effective date of a posted revision evidences acceptance. Please contact us if you have questions or concerns about the Privacy Notice or any objection to any revisions.

Last Update: November 17, 2020