Defense Finance Accounting Services Use HHS Code to Make Mobile-Friendly Tables

Dec 11, 2014
table overflow code

Government mobile code developed to help make tables mobile-friendly in one agency has now been used in another agency’s mobile efforts.

Last month, Clair Koroma told DigitalGov readers about code that the Department of Health and Human Services had developed to make website tables mobile-friendly and then HHS shared it on the Mobile Code Sharing Catalog. Debra Fiorrito from the Defense Financial Accounting Service and her developer, Todd Posius, have implemented the code on the DFAS.mil site.

Fioritto, the program manager for DFAS.mil said in an interview, that one of the DFAS challenges has been “dealing with tables as a thorn in their side.” Approximately 5% of DFAS.mil pages have tables “with not a lot of consistency, and on mobile the tables just extended off the page.”

Fioritto was excited to see Koroma had posted the article with the code on DigitalGov. Fioritto showed HHS’ code to Posius who reviewed it, then added the 3-4 lines of code to the DFAS CMS templates, and “now all of the tables scroll wonderfully.” He wasn’t able to really test the code until it was published, but he said it was “really pretty easy.”

Fioritto and Posius couldn’t be happier with how this process turned out. “We bow down to HHS and thank them for all the hard work they did,” Fiorrito mused.

The code is a boon for agencies who are developing mobile tables, but the HHS code is not the only code available for agencies to share. The Mobile Code Catalog features 45 snippets of government code for mobile Web and native apps that agencies have shared.

Mike Pulsifer of the Department of Labor has been leading the code sharing effort from the MobileGov Community of Practice and one of the things he’s learned in MobileGov Chop Shops and other events around the effort is that small code snippets from agencies can have a big impact.

HHS and DFAS just proved that.

You can join the effort. What other code does your department need to enhance its mobile efforts?