Users of RiverStar Studio will be familiar with its workflows and process flows as a series of pages. As mentioned in our previous entry about the Studio 11 update, we’ve enhanced the functionality of pages with a new object: panels. 

What Is a Panel?

A panel is a sub-page – a building block – that can be used over and over again. You can add text, fields and actions, and it can be shown or hidden. It can be displayed as a pop-up dialog for data input, and it can include HTML containers, such as tabs and accordions. 

Why Do I Need Panels?

Panels enable you to put similar elements on different pages. By creating one panel and using it over and over, not only do you save yourself time, but you implement consistency in the event that you want to change something on the panel. Once you change it in the original, it will change everywhere the panel is used.

How Can I Use Panels?

• Set a panel to display as a dialog. You can build a panel that will launch a dialog and guide users through a desired action. When they visit the page, the panel will remain hidden until they trigger it through an action – such as clicking a button or checking a box. 


• Building wizards. Panels come in handy when you have a step-by-step process through which you’d like to guide users. Again, you’ll use panels to create dialogs, but in the case of a wizard, you’ll create a sub-panel for each step of the process that appears and disappears as needed.


• Customize the look and feel of matrices. Before the introduction of panels, the input of data into matrices was limited to rows and columns. With panels, you have more flexibility in where you add values to a page.

A great example of how panels add efficiency to process is in complex forms. Let’s say you have a list of customers whose information needs to be updated. If you brought up the list in a matrix, you would have a row for each customer and a column for each element of the customer’s information. You would then have to toggle between screens, selecting the row in one screen and then updating the information in another, repeating the process for each customer.  

With panels, you can display the rows as tabs, accordions or in a list, making navigation from customer to customer intuitive and efficient. You can also choose how users navigate the form, implementing consistency into your process. 

Have you tried out panels yet? What have you used them to build? Let us know in the comments!