Questions on Mendix 5 Layouts Best Practices and possible enhancements

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I am trying to understand the best way to use the new layout features in Mendix 5 and wonder if anyone has some suggestions for best practices. Take a situation where we have an application targeted at multiple client devices - desktop, tablet and mobile. The Content of forms might be largely the same for desktop and tablet devices, but might be simpler for mobile devices. Additionally, some forms I might want to open sometimes in content, and sometimes as pop-up. Am I right in thinking that currently I need to create a Form for each device or mode using the appropriate layout template, even though the actual content may often be the same? I am worried that for a large application this may become complicated to manage, and involve a lot of duplication of content layout which needs to be kept in sync. Would it not have been easier if you could create the Content layout as a separate object, and for each show-form action or edit button, specify both the Content object to use and which Layout/placeholder to put it in. That way you might have a much smaller number of content layouts to manage. An alternative might be to design most of the content layouts to be snippets, to be reused in multiple forms, but while this solves the problem of simplifying managing layout changes, it does not help with the number of separate forms, and increases their complexity. Does anyone have any suggestions about the best way to address this? @Ronald - yes that's the point. The tablet is probably large enough to have a similar layout, but if you have a separate Layout template (perhaps with different graphics, as is created by default in new apps for each device), you end up making at least 2 copies of every form. It seems to me you could avoid this by being able to specify a combination of content layout and layout template
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My suggestion towards Mendix, please change in the Action activity "Show Page". Allowing the developer to overwrite the default layout of the page. Just like the 'Page Title'

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David, I think with bootstrap that we now we would be able to design one form for the desktop / tablet users of your application (responsive design). The only problem would be the phone users. And to be realistic I would never expect that the whole application should work on my phone. I do think that certain aspects of my application also should be usable from the phone. So in my opinion would this be the only use case where I would need to design different forms.

That said, when designing for the real small screens I would go for the snippets option where it is possible. But I think for thosee screen sizes less is more and a complete redesign is necesarry.

Regards,

Ronald

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