Field and Control Placement

Home Overview Card Design Philosophy Field and Control Placement

As described in the chapter Card Design Philosophy, with MoStacks you do not design a card by placing fields and controls yourself, but MoStacks calculates the layout of a card and places all things for you, and there are some arguments why this is actually a good idea, on a small smartphone screen.

First, the general rules that MoStacks uses for doing so, and later your possibilities to influence the layout by giving hints:

The order of the fields and controls in the background is central: MoStacks places them onto a card in that order, starting at the top of a card, always placing the next control below it, and so on. Thus the principal layout has something like lines, with one field per line.

The heights of those lines can vary wildly, according to the control: A simple Text field results in a narrow line. If a large font is in effect for the field, it gets a little higher to accomodate the higher letters of the font. But a single text field can already fill the whole card, if you specify a high enough number of visible lines.

Label text goes to the left of the fields. The longest label text decides the starting position of the fields themselves. However, their is a limit: MoStacks does not start the fields farther to the right than half the screen width. Otherwise already one exceptionally long label would leave no room at all for the fields!

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