The next major release of OpenUI5 is out (see official post on OpenUI5 Blog). Let’s see which new features were added in the past 3 months and how useful they are. To do so, I added a dedicated page „New Features v1.22“ with some of the new controls to the UI5 Boilerplate and update the „UI5 Boilerplate Demo Website“, so you can see them „live“ and „in action“. As always we focus on mobile usage.
New Date Input Controls „DatePicker“ and „Calendar“
So far only the DateTime Control was available. A Calender Control was only part of sap.me library, which was not open sourced and only available within in SAPUI5. With OpenUI5 version 1.22 the new Calendar control (sap.m.Calendar) is filling this gap. Another new input control DatePicker (sap.m.DatePicker) is making use of the calendar to select a date. You can compare this three controls and the different way to select a date on the demo page, each with his advantages:
These two new controls do work pretty well on my iPad, good job UI5 team!
New ComboBox, MultiComboBox and MultiInput
The new ComboBox seems to be an alternative to existing Select control or Input control with suggestion functionality. MultiComboBox and MultiInput both work with Tokens. They look pretty nice:
Unfortunately I’m not able to remove Tokens on my device (here iPad), only the keyboard is shown up, but nothing is removed. On desktop you can remove Tokens with a mouse click. On the MultiComboBox you can workaround with the valuehelp, but MultiInput seems not be usable on a device at all with this behaviour. I’m wondering if I do something wrong here as the control is part of sap.m library which is dedicated to mobile devices. Hmmm??? Further investigation seems necessary.
Compact Mode.. and more
There are pretty much more parts in this major release, but last topic I want to have look at is the new Compact Mode display mode. Use the also new ToogleButton to switch on the Compact Mode, which enables displaying more content on the same area, but also brings up some display issue, as I do not switch the menu page to compact mode:
All in all a good job done by UI5 Team and I’m looking forward to v1.24!