1 Reply Latest reply on Jan 22, 2007 2:25 AM by stephen.friedrich

    Interaction Design for Conversations?

    stephen.friedrich

      We started our project a while ago, but Seam is only a recent addition to our toolset.
      I have a hard time figuring out how to implement conversations, so that the extended persistence context as well as multiple browser windows and backbutton works.

      In general my impression is that to make use of conversations you must have conversations in mind right from the start when you design the user interface of your app. However there's no way we can make fundamental changes to the UI at this stage of the project.

      Is there any way to implement conversations correctly with this basic style of UI:

      Menu-Links: Employees | Clients | Projects | ...
      ------------------------------------------------
      
      List Selected Project Details
      ---- ------------------------
      Project A |
      Project B | Name: _______
      Project C | Lead: _______(Employee Dropdown) Go-> (Link to selected employee's details)
      Project D | ...
      Project E | Save-Button
      
      New-Button
      

      In most pages there's a main menu for the different types of entities, a list showing all the entities of this type plus an edit form for the entity that is currently selected in the list. Several fields in the form have links to referenced entities.

      The main problem I see is that there's no explicit "Start to Edit"-button to whose action I could add a @Begin annotation. Currently the edit form is also used just for browsing and navigation.

      Any ideas and suggestions are highly welcome.