During the BlackBerry Developer Conference last month I made the mistake of promising to publish some examples of the concepts that were outlined in the presentation. By mistake, I should have known once I said that I'd be traveling nonstop for the next month (or longer).

Anyway after many hours being board on planes and waiting to fly into Atlanta airport on a Friday (why can't they land/take off in the rain? If that was the case I'd never have left England), I decided to get the first one out of the way.

This demos a screen with multiple regions that are all hidden. Depending on user input (or in the real world from an inbound message or data element) the screen is "dynamic". This drastically cuts done on the number of screens in an app and also makes debugging far easier. Additionally, it also shows why you should use scripts to enter and exit screens (also in the presentation). The screen in question is scrDisplay and has four different fields. A text, number list and radio, only one of these is shown depending on what you select in the scrMain screen. Not a whole lot there, but hopefully this will get fellow MDS developers thinking. See, not only can you do this on the way into a screen, but also on the way out.

The demo was written in MDS Studio 1.1, but you should be able to import it in MDS Studio 2.0 (it will get converted but it should be OK).

If you don't have MDS Studio get it from the BlackBerry site here.

BBDevCon_Region_Example.zip

DevConPresentationE12.pdf