Mobile devices are different from desktop PCs; while you can open any report or document in an iPad, the best option is to design specific documents for small screens only. You will be able to leverage capabilities like swipe, tap-and-hold, rotate screen, and so on.
So, back to the drawing board, let's do some basic math. First and second generation iPads have a screen size of 1024 x 768 pixels, while third generation have 2048 x 1536. I will use the former for the recipes, and we need to account for the status bar (20 pixels), title bar (44 pixels), and the optional page-by bar (41 pixels). That leaves us, in landscape mode, roughly 1024 x 660 of usable space.
When the user rotates the device by 90 degrees, of course, the numbers change. MicroStrategy makes our life a lot easier when dealing with screen rotation, thanks to one of the best and most useful features: the views. We will explore them later.
The first thing we should do when developing mobile documents is to work with pixels as measurement unit, not inches nor centimeters.
We are using MicroStrategy Web for all the document development processes, so go to Start | All Programs | MicroStrategy | Web | Web, to bring up Internet Explorer:
- Click on the COOKBOOK project and log in as usual.
- Click on the upper-left red MicroStrategy logo, and select Preferences:
- In the User Preferences page, under the General pane look for the Language header and click on Show advanced options.
- Open the Measurement Units dropdown and select Pixels.
- Click on the small floppy disk button on the top-left corner to save the preferences, and then hit the Close button to go back to the project's home page.
- In the home page, click on Create Document; in the Document Templates choose iPad Landscape.
- When the new empty document appears, click on the Tools | Document Properties menu.
- On the left, under Page Setup, click on Page. See that the Width and Height values are displayed in pixels and already defined to fill the full iPad screen (with no page-by bar). Also the Orientation radio button is set to Landscape.
- Now under Layout Properties, click on Mobile. There is a dropdown labeled Supported Orientations. This controls whether the screen will change or not when the user rotates the device.
Notice that in this case the only orientation supported is Landscape.
- Go back to the home page.
- Repeat steps 6 to 10, this time use the iPad Portrait template.
MicroStrategy offers several ready-to-use templates to create mobile devices dashboards. These are very convenient to design fixed-view documents.
The Supported Orientations combobox allows you to decide which of the following modes the document will display in:
- Portrait Only
- Landscape Only
- Portrait and Landscape
Of course the challenge is to create auto-arranging views, so that the user can have different perspective in horizontal and in vertical orientation.
Create two documents: one with the landscape template and another one with portrait.
In each document put a textbox saying something like "This is horizontal only", "This is vertical only", and see how they look on the iPad screen.
If you don't see a document in the list, try to close and re-open the MicroStrategy Mobile application. You should rotate your head together with the mobile device to see it correctly (ok, sorry about that…).