Hiding Complex Detail Sections on Phones Without Breaking Deep Links
Hiding Complex Detail Sections on Phones Without Breaking Deep Links A small fix from the Staffpoint project, and the three edge cases that made it bigger than it looked Staffpoint is a staffing and scheduling platform built on ASP.NET WebForms. A recent fix on the Personnel Details page dealt with a problem every responsive retrofit of an old app eventually hits: some screens simply do not work on a phone yet, and hiding a tab is not enough to keep users out of them. This post covers what the issue was, what the fix changed, and the edge cases that turned a one-line CSS change into a small routing policy. The issue The Personnel Details page is a single-page shell. It loads a person's record and shows a row of tabs: Details, Qualifications, Availability, Accreditations, Notes, Rates, and a few more. Each tab loads its content over AJAX into the shell, and the current tab is encoded in the URL hash, so #availability-1234 means "Availability for person 1234." Tha...