>>>I have a question about the following design approach for web application which targets are tablet browsers like iPad, Nexus, etc. The approach I choose is the following:
>>>The main page of the application has a pull-down menu. When user clicks on an item of the menu a new tab is opened. For example, one of the items on the menu is View Order. And I envision that a user may want to see several orders at the same time. So when he/she clicks on this menu anchor, a new tab is opened where user enters order number and views the order. At the same time he/she can click on the same menu item again and open another tab to view another order. And so on. So practically, the main tab/page of the application will host the main menu and some static text (I have not come up with what text though).
>>>What do you think about this UI approach? Would this type of app be called MPA (Multiple Page Application) as opposed to SPA (Single Page Application)?
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>>Sounds OK to me. It's a MPA.
>>FWIW, with Chrome on a Nexus when there are multiple tabs they can be scrolled across to find the one you want so it works quite well.
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>>An alternate using SPA might be to put each order as it is loaded into a separate div and arrange things so that only one order was visible at any one time. That way you could implement a 'Close All' behaviour which you couldn't do using separate tabs.....
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>I may buy a Nexus (because it is reasonably priced) when I am ready to test on various devices. Then I will see what you mean by "scroll across" (not quite get it).

Rather than packing all the tabs in whatever space is available (as in DeskTop Chome) the tabs stay full sized but you can 'swipe' to scroll the tabs horizontally.

>And I agree that closing all in one page is easier. But the alternative is "how come I can't work on two orders at the same time? " :)

But they could - just maintain a dropdown list of open orders at the top of the page and, when a user selects one then (on the client) hide the div for the current order and show the div for the selected order.

>Ideally I may set a preference in Web.config so that the application could work in SPA or MPA depending on user preference. But then it would complicate things quite a bit (for me).

But web.config settings will be global for all users. You could use local storage (assuming HTML5) to store the preference on a per user basis- but I've a feeling that the two approaches are so different that you'd almost need two separate versions for the UI....