TilesFX 17.0.11

Aloha,

when working with dashboard using my TilesFX library I came across some missing things...first of all I needed a Tile that simply has a text in the center of it. Well nothing easier than that...I simply added a CenterTextTileSkin class that offers exactly this functionality. Here is a little screenshot that shows it in action...

As you can see I needed it to visualize the state of a server. If the server goes down the text will change from "ONLINE" to "OFFLINE" and the background color of the tile will change from green to red...very simple but very effective :)

To change the text you have to set the description of the tile.

Here is the code to create the tile above:

Tile serverTile = TileBuilder.create()
                             .skinType(SkinType.CENTER_TEXT)
                             .title("Server")
                             .text("Last check")
                             .backgroundColor(Dark.GREEN)
                             .description("ONLINE")
                             .build();

The other thing I stumbled upon was the fact that handling big numbers in a dashboard can really suck. When you have a dashboard with lots of tiles, there is sometimes simply not enough space to show those big numbers.

So the idea again is simple...just shorten the big numbers to a more readable format. For example 2350 can become 2.3k and 1230401 can become 1.2M. With this you can also show big numbers in a small tile.

The feature to use here is the property shortenNumbers in Tile. I've added it for some tiles where I thought it might come in handy but there might still be places where it is missing...so if you find a place where it could make sense, please file an issue over at github. 

You could also use the method Helper.shortenNumber(final long value) to shorten the numbers on your own before you set it somewhere. The method will return the formatted number as a String.

The result of using the shortenNumber property in Tile can be seen in the left Tile on image above.

Those new features can be found in the latest version of TilesFX which is 17.0.11 and which is available on github and also on Maven central.

That's it for today...so keep coding... :)