Master's Thesis of Sirma Gjorgievska
The User Interface (UI) of an application is often one of the core factors determining its success. The model-based UI development aims to provide an environment where developers can design and implement UIs more easily than when using traditional UI development tools. To achieve this aim, many model-based UI design approaches have been proposed. Despite the several advantages of model-based UIs, there are still a lot of cases, where developers have to manually create forms, which can be time-consuming and error-prone. Therefore, we propose a concept of developing model-based forms where the user can describe them with a Form Model, which allows creating web forms in a more efficient manner. Namely, the Form Model enables creating multiple forms for a single data model and adapting changes in the Form Model with minimum effort. The main goal of this Master thesis is to design a generic Form Model that provides a unified and a holistic description of model-based forms, which defines additional aspects of the UI such as: structure, information, behavior and style. There are several challenges in the creation of Form Models that we address in this Master Thesis, e.g. configuring support for server communication, in-line validation, internationalization, data validation, visualization of validation messages and multi-valued attributes. In addition to that, we implement a Renderer in order to generate web forms based on the proposed Form Model and a given Data Model. The evaluation of our proposal has been made on a next generation CMS system SocioCortex, which we have extended with our proposed model using JSON, JSON-Schema, and AngularJS.
Research questions
- How is the term model-based forms defined?
- What are the approaches for generating model-based forms?
- How a Form Model, which includes the UI aspects: Structure, Information, Behavior and Style looks like?
- How a Renderer that will generate model-based forms looks like?
- How to design a prototype implementation of the proposed Form Model and incorporate it into SocioCortex platform?
| Attribute | Value |
|---|---|
| Title (de) | Einsatz expliziter Formular-Modelle zur Verbesserung der Benutzbarkeit modell- und web-basierter Benutzerschnittstellen |
| Title (en) | Improving the UX of Model-based Web User Interfaces using explicit Form Models |
| Project | SocioCortex - Model-Based Collaboration Environment |
| Type | Master's Thesis |
| Status | completed |
| Student | Sirma Gjorgievska |
| Advisor | Adrian Hernandez-Mendez |
| Supervisor | Prof. Dr. Florian Matthes |
| Start Date | 15.06.2016 |
| Sebis Contributor Agreement signed on | 07.06.2016 |
| Checklist filled | Yes |
| Submission date | 15.12.2016 |