Master UX for Processes With the Blazor Wizard 1: Customize the Component

With the UI for Blazor’s Wizard component you can add a wizard to your application in minutes—which gives you lots of time to customize the wizard’s UI.


This content originally appeared on Telerik Blogs and was authored by Peter Vogel

With the UI for Blazor’s Wizard component you can add a wizard to your application in minutes—which gives you lots of time to customize the wizard’s UI.

If you need to guide your user through a difficult task, a wizard is often your best choice. The point of the Telerik UI for Blazor Wizard component is to make it ridiculously easy for you to add and customize a wizard to your application so that you can help out your users.

For example, to create this wizard:

A mockup of a wizard. Across the top of the wizard are ca series of five circles, joined by a horizontal line. The first circle has a blue background and a checkmark in it. The other four circles are numbered 2 through 5 and have captions below them: “Overview,” “Pick Date Range,” “Select Occurrences,” “Define Case,” and “Save Changes.” Under the row of circles, on the left is the heading “Overview.” The center of the screenshot contains the text “—Wizard Step UI—“. On the bottom on the left is the text “Step 1 of 5.” On the right at the bottom is a blue button with the text “Next.”

all you need is this Razor markup:

<TelerikWizard>
    <WizardSteps>
        <WizardStep Label="Overview">
            <Content>
                <h2>Overview</h2>
            </Content>
        </WizardStep>
       …repeat WizardStep for each step in your wizard…
    </WizardSteps>
</TelerikWizard>

Not only will you get the built-in Next button shown in the screenshot but, as the user pages through the Wizard, a Previous button will magically appear beside it in each of the subsequent steps. And, on the wizard’s last step, the Next button will morph into a Done button. Progress through the Blazor Wizard will be automatically fed back to the user in list of steps at the top of the wizard.

After designing the UI for each of your steps using some combination of HTML and components, all you have to do is write a method that implements the Wizard’s business logic, using the entries from each step’s UI. Finally, you need to bind that method to TelerikWizard’s OnFinish event:

<TelerikWizard OnFinish="@DoTheWizardStuff" …

But you may want to enhance this default user interface.

Dressing the Display

The TelerikWizard for Blazor gives you a lot control over that default display, if you want to take advantage of it. If, for example, you wanted to enhance that list of steps at the top of the wizard with some icons, you can assign icons to each step by using the Icon attribute on a WizardStep:

<WizardStep Label="Overview" Icon="info-circle" >        

That can give you a display like this:

Just the row of circles from the previous screenshot. The numbers in the circles have been replaced with icons (a calendar, a chain link, an open folder, and 3 ½ inch floppy – the first circle still has a checkmark and a blue background). Underneath the five circles are the captions “Overview,” “Pick Date Range,” “Select Occurrences,” “Define Case,” and “Save Changes.” The first circle still has the blue background and a checkmark in it.

You can find a full list of the available icons on the Telerik site. If you can’t find a suitable icon from the ones listed there, you can replace the Icon with the image of your choice by using the WizardStep’s ImageUrl attribute or improve the formatting of the icon with the IconClass attribute.

One piece of advice: If you find yourself having to stretch the meaning of an icon to get it to fit a step in your wizard, remember that you don’t have to include an icon. The purpose of the icon is to help your user understand the difficult task that your wizard is guiding them through—an obscure icon isn’t going to help with that.

In fact, you can abandon icons altogether and just go with text on every step by setting the WizardStep’s Text property. You can set Text property to icons, digits or text (though you should keep text short so that it fits into the circles that make up the progress bar interface). Setting text on all the WizardSteps gives markup like this with, perhaps, “too much” content in the Text property:

<WizardStep Text="Pick Date Range" >

And would give you a display like this, with text spilling out of the circles:

The list of circles from the previous screenshot. The first circle still has a blue background and a checkmark but has no text. In the other four circles, the icons and captions below the circles have been replaced with text running over top of the circles: “Pick Date Range,” “Select Occurrences,” “Define Case,” and “Save Changes.”

Dynamically Managing Labels and Icons

If you do want a lot of text in your UI, you’d be better off using the steps’ Label property, which displays your text below the circles and reserves the circles for your icons. This markup uses the Label and Icon properties (and is what you saw in the first graphic in this post):

WizardStep Label="Case Defined" 
                    Icon="unlock">

If you use both your labels and your icons but have an environment where you only want to use the labels (on smaller displays, for example), you can use the WizardStepperSettings to dynamically suppress your icons. First, add a WizardSettings element to your TelerikWizard and nest a WizardStepperSettings element inside it. After that, set the StepType to a field (or property in your code):

<WizardSettings>
        <WizardStepperSettings StepType="@suppressIcons"/>        
</WizardSettings>

In your code, you need to declare that field or property as a StepperStypeType and initialize it. This code declares a field and initializes it to display both labels and icons:

private StepperStepType suppressIcons = StepperStepType.Steps;

Now, elsewhere in your code, you can suppress your icons by setting the field to StepperStype.Labels:

suppressIcons = StepperStepType.Labels

Your display will switch from this:

A repeat of the screenshot with the circles containing icons with captions below each circle.

To this:

The list of circles but the circles (with their icons and text) have been replaced with text. The first circle has the text “Overview” with a green checkmark to its right. The other positions along the line are “Pick Date Range,” “Select Occurrences,” “Define Case,” and “Save Changes.”

You can also control where the list of steps will display by setting the Wizard’s StepperPosition attribute to a value from the WizardStepperPosition enum. The default is top but, if you prefer, you can have the list display down the left side with this markup:

<TelerikWizard StepperPosition="WizardStepperPosition.Left" …

That will give you a display something like this:

A repeat of the first screenshot. However, instead of the row of circles running across the top of the wizard, the row of circles runs down the side of the wizard. The captions for each circle appear to the right of each circle with its icon instead of below the icon. In this screen shot, the first three icons have blue backgrounds and the Next button on the right has a button with the caption “Previous” to its left.

You can’t make the step list disappear using code or Razor markup but, by default, the HTML for the step is assigned a CSS rule called k-stepper. You can set the CSS display property for that rule so that the display of the step list is suppressed. A CSS rule like this would do the trick:

.k-stepper {display: none !important;}

And, of course, there’s nothing stopping you from binding the WizardSteps’ Icon, Label, Text or other attributes to fields or properties and setting them dynamically from code.

Your Responsibilities

But you don’t really have to do any of those things in your Blazor application. Really, all you have to do is build out a user interface inside each step, check to make sure the user enters good data, and wire up any code you need to run when the user clicks the Done button.

As far as building out the UI for each step goes, any combination of HTML and components that you want to put inside of the Content element nested inside each WizardStep will work. However, if you take advantage of the integration with the Telerik Form UI component for Blazor, you can use the Form’s validation system to simplify validating the user’s entries.

You can do more, of course—you probably shouldn’t let the user advance to the next step in your wizard if your validation finds problems, for example. I’ll discuss how to manage that in my next post.


This content originally appeared on Telerik Blogs and was authored by Peter Vogel


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