Everything You’ve Ever Wanted to Know About UI Components

Building an attractive user face is an important requirement for any application for promoting positive user engagement. In modern application designing, components play a key role in achieving reusability and compatibility across multiple platforms. In simple terms, a component is a logical grouping that represents a particular web element that does a specific task that you can re-use across your application. UI components are the major building blocks of any application. Today, many component libraries provide a wide range of UI components for anything you need to visualize in your UI. 

For example, Ext Js Kitchen Sink consists of simple components such as Buttons, DataView, Login Forms to more sophisticated components like Grid, Trees, Charts, and Calendar. Let’s explore in this article everything you have ever wanted to know about UI components.

Usually, a UI component is a child component of a parent UI component. Users’ basic UI components include rendering a template, showing and hiding, enabling and disabling, and centering in the main container. Users can also do advanced functions based on the component, such as changing the size and position, drag and drop, floating, docking other components, etc. For example, all Sencha UI components are children of the parent class Ext. Component. Therefore, all the components inherit every function of a parent component. 

UI components make UI building an easy task for web developers. UI components libraries allow developers to drag and drop the component they want without writing any code to help accelerate the development. However, developers also get the flexibility to customize the components according to the way they want. Such reusable components help organize a UI and maintain consistency across the entire application. It also means components help standardize a UI. 

Buttons components are basic UI components frequently used in the application among all the UI components. They help you take any action, such as directing the page to another page and making a choice. Developers not only can include basic button functionality but also, there are offers a wide range of button components, from basic to advanced. For example, Ext Js Button components include Menu buttons that can drop a menu upon clicking the button, Split buttons with icons and texts, buttons containing a link, and segmented buttons. Developers can make use of such advanced button components to provide more capabilities for the UI.

To make a component functional, data binding is an essential requirement. You can use component configs to bind data. When you connect the data with the component config, it automatically reflects any update to data. Components can do different types of data binding. 

For example, Ext Js Dynamic data binding enables dynamically generating data in components. Two-way data binding is another capability Ext Js provides. In two-way data binding, when one component changes, another component will automatically change accordingly. Other data binding components can include connecting formulas, binding associations, changing the components state, chaining combo boxes based on the data, and chaining selections. In addition, you can do remote data binding to render data from external data sources. All these data binding helps realize data utilization the way developers want. 

A grid is an important UI component that helps render millions of data efficiently on a web page without affecting the application performance. You can build tables with advanced functionalities such as sorting, filtering, adding charts to visualize data, advanced searching, and pagination using grid components. 

Ext Js grid library, for instance, offers many core features for developers. Grouped grids enable building grids that can group data, and you can use grouped header grids to group by the header field. You can add a checkbox to select the data and add row numbers. There are also functionalities specific to rows and columns, such as row editing, expanding and cell editing, etc. 

Sometimes you may be required to display data summaries in a table for which pivot components should be the ideal choice. Pivot grids can show summaries of data columns from a large volume of data. It means you can use pivot grids to show powerful data analytics to understand useful insights from data. You can use Ext Js pivot grids three layouts for pivot grids which are outline, compact and tabular layouts. Also, you can lock in some of the columns if you have several columns in your pivot grid. 

Data visualization using different types of charts like pie charts, line charts, and bar graphs is a very useful feature you may want to include in your web applications. You can do this by using UI components. For example, Ext Js offers UI components for building different charts. If you want to build column or bar charts, you can use basic charts or stacked, renderer, or multi-axis column or bar charts. Ext Js also offer 3-D bar and column charts. Other charts include line, pie, radar, gauge, box plot, and many more. Therefore, developers build powerful data visualization with different types of chart components.

UI components are the building block of any web application re-usable across all the UIs. Therefore, UI components make a developer’s life easier. Today, several UI libraries offer useful components for almost any task, such as building tables with millions of data to visualize the data providing analytics insights. This article talked about everything you have ever wanted to know about UI components providing examples from Ext Js UI components. Each component type consists of basic components to components with advanced features. Ext Js kitchen sink provides useful components developers can build powerful UIs with almost no code and less development time. 

Get started building powerful UIs with Ext Js  UI Components!