So it’s no secret that I’m doing a lot of XPages Web Development for iPads and I have a complete love – hate relationship with XPages Mobile controls. In some ways they’re great. In some ways they are not so great at all. Not all of that is XPages fault – though some is – but some of the problem is in the Dojo that drives the mobile controls.
So I really want to abandon Mobile Controls, if nothing else the whole single page App is just really really hard to debug. If you navigate to a page you can’t EASILY view source for instance. You need to catch it with a tool like firebug.
Anyway, so I found this project that I really wanted to use. https://github.com/commadelimited/jQuery-Mobile-Bootstrap-Theme
In theory it’s a marriage of Twitter Bootstrap and a css “theme” that makes some elements look like you would on a mobile device. Ideally I’d love to have the mobile look and feel since I think it’s easier for the users then a glorified web page, but I’m desperate to get to normal XPages and away from these virtual pages. Even if the fancy transitions are lost I don’t really care any more.
So it seems it’s not just a CSS framework like I thought but it does require jQuery Mobile. Ok – I gave it a try and guess what. It didn’t work. not at all. The mobile goodies would NOT render!
Until I completely disabled Dojo!
Disabling Dojo is not an option for me. I just can’t hand code all that stuff. It’s not going to happen. I’m going to be using XPages I want to USE XPages. But why didn’t it work? Well I had to turn to the jQuery Master himself – Mark Roden. He took a look at it for me which I greatly appreaciated!
We’re not sure, but we think there’s a conflict between Dojo and jQuery Mobile with the “data-role” attribute. I guess both frameworks make use of that and Dojo 1.8 grabs it first and shuts jQuery out. If I downgraded Dojo I BELIEVE it would work but that’s not an option for me.=
Apparantly I’m not the only one with this problem.
That’s what I think I know at least. If anyone knows something else please chime in!
Personally I’m not sure what to do. XPages Mobile controls are difficult and missing things like a bottom TabBar, though I believe the redPill company has solved that problem. I believe Kendo UI uses virtual pages as well. JQuery Mobile seems like you need to drop Dojo.
I think I might try the Twitter Bootstrap 3 Release Candidate. Not really sure though.
Kinda annoying actually…