Messages

Usage

System Messages

Typically an iViews should not issue system messages.

Success Messages

In some cases we recommend giving feedback on a user's successfully completed action. Among these cases are:

critical business applications (e.g. "Your order has been taken")
actions which have an effect the user cannot see directly (e.g. adding an item to my favorite's list which is displayed on another page, or saving preferences)

Error Messages

An iView should be programmed so that error messages do not occur. Therefore, before putting effort into error messages and asking how they should look like, where they should appear and what the wording should be, consider to avoid errors so that your iViews does not need error messages at all.

See Help and User Support for details and examples on error prevention.

Location

If messages cannot be avoided, system and error messages that refer to the iView as a whole are displayed above the iView content. They are set off the header bar and the following content by five pixels each (cf. Figure 1).

Messages referring to one element of an iView (e.g. one field of a form) are placed directly above this element with an offset of five pixels.

Types

There are two message types

Critical: Error messages, warnings, alerts
Uncritical: System messages, success messages (see above), status messages etc.

Figure 1: Critical and uncritical messages referring to the iView as a whole.

Both message types are visually distinct:

Critical messages are displayed in white bold type on a red background reaching across the width of the iView. The message text is displayed left-aligned.
Uncritical messages are printed on the iView in black bold type.

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