Popups are often associated with online advertising windows. UiaML regards popups as application windows that are associated with a link from an other window. A dialog window asking the user whether or not (s)he is sure to replace a file is an example of an UiaML popup window; as are help windows and tooltips.

In this howto we will explain how to model a popup using UiaML.

Normal popups

The UiaML popup symbol is an element of the sitemap view (SMV). To trigger a popup we need a link between two Pages. The popup is triggered by the associative link between that link and the popup.

The help screen is an example of a popup you might regularly encounter. Imagine that we have “A Sitemap”, that holds a contentarea (“Content X”) within a page (“Page X”) that holds a link that will trigger a help window.

Our documentation of the popup should therefore be:

The popup refers toward a page called “Help X page” that is part of the sitemap labeled as “Help”.

So we have to model this sitemap as wel.

To close the help window the user has to select the close symbol of the window itself that will result in the termination of the window.

But since this is the default behavior offered by the operating system, we normally not model this within UiaML (but we can use this link to change the default system behavior).

In this example we choose that we want to offer our users that they can close the help window by following a link on the helppage. This link starts at the contentarea that offers the link and ends at the terminator symbol.

Since the help window is not a mandatory popup window the user can also choose not to close the window, place it in the background, and continue to navigate within the sitemap of “A Sitemap”.

Imagine that the user navigates toward a page that we will call “Page Y” which hold a contentarea that we will call “Content Y”. “Content Y” also holds a link that will trigger the help window to appear with the associated help page.

Because the sitemaps in our popup example use a name and because the used name is the same the content within the application window will be replaced by the content of the popup last triggered.

To enable users to navigate within the help window between different help topic we can add a menu. Our sitemap of “A Sitemap” also knows a contentarea called “Menu”, our sitemap of “Help” however knows nothing about that, so we can reuse contentarea names and page titels used within other sitemaps without conflict.