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Recommended guidelines for message handling.

We recommend to invest care and energy in good message content:

  • Provide short and crisp error messages to the user.
  • A message should always contain a 'Call for Action'.
  • To achieve the above you need to map error messages from a backend system.
  • Focus on the most common error situations and improve the messages there.
  • For the rest simply state that a 'Backend' or 'Database' error has occurred. The user cannot handle this anyway and no further details are required. If technically feasible, ease the process of receiving support from IT, for example submit the issue and related information to support or at least provide contact information.
  • It is a must to detect all problems related to network connectivity and indicate them as such.
Messages Related to a Page

For showing messages to the user that are related to the currrent page you have two options depending on the importance of the message.

Message Dialog:

  • A message dialog interrupts the user's workflow by blocking the current page and needs to be closed by the user.
  • Use a message dialog if the message is important and must be acknowledged by the user.
  • The easiest way of showing a message dialog is to use the sap.m.MessageBox.
  • If you want full control of the content you can also use sap.m.Dialog control and set the type to sap.m.DialogType.Message.
  • As MessageBox is a static class, a jQuery.sap.require("sap.m.MessageBox"); statement must be explicitly executed before the class can be used.

Example:

jQuery.sap.require("sap.m.MessageBox");
sap.m.MessageBox.show(
    "Data not loaded", 
    sap.m.MessageBox.Icon.ERROR,
    "Operation failed",
    [sap.m.MessageBox.Action.RETRY, sap.m.MessageBox.Action.IGNORE]
);

Message Toast:

  • A message toast is an overlay that disappears after some time or if the user taps somewhere else. It does not block the user.
  • Use this pattern if the message is less important and the user should not be blocked in his work.
  • You can open a message toast easily with the sap.m.MessageToast API. 
sap.m.MessageToast.show("Item deleted");
Messages Related to Elements of a Page

For showing messages to the user that are related to a specific element of a page there is no dedicated UI control available in sap.m in this version. We recommend to use the sap.ui.core.HTML control to show these error messages 'somewhere close to the input' or use some kind of overlay. Consider that the user will have the on screen keyboard open which might hide messages. Putting the message above an input field could help.

You can set the ValueState of the sap.m.Input control to 'Error' to indicate that the content is not correct.

Multiple Messages

SAPUI5 Mobile does not support multiple messages at the same time. Mobile Designs recommend to be 'more sparse' with messages, that is, only show one message at a time. This can also be achieved by combining and reducing multiple messages.