1. Unbundling the Applications
2. Customization of Masks
3. Documentation
1. Unbundling the Applications
Previous releases required you to have your application located under the <b-frame/> tree in a subfolder app. This restriction is now gone, you may locate your <b-frame/> application wherever you want. In order to demonstrate how this has to be done, the examples package has been moved into a new project and repository, you can checkout the examples with
cvs -d :ext:@cvs.sourceforge.net:/cvsroot/b-frame co b-frame-examples
You should do this in the same directory where <b-frame&> resides.
The downloadable <b-frame> distribution still contains the examples, and for compatibility they are still under "b-frame/app".
The app.name property is not defined in the system properties file "b-frame/build.properties", but in the application properties file "b-frame-examples/build.properties". There you can also override any property of the default "b-frame/build.properties" file.
When you update your b-frame directory with CVS, remember to copy the b-frame-examples directory into b-frame, since it resides in a different repository.
In fact, all commands you issue are just forwarded to <b-frame/>. All you have to do is to tell where <b-frame/> and Ant are installed. You can do so by copying "setpath_example.bat" (if you are using Windows) to "setpath.bat" and assign correct values to the variables BFRAME_HOME and ANT_HOME. If you have chosen the complete distribution or if everything is installed in the same directory you can leave the values unchanged.
The procedure for compilation and deployment is the same as described in the tutorial, except that you do not use ant directly, e.g.,
ant deploy
but say
.\build.bat deploy
(or ./build.sh, respectively) instead.
The application being compiled is the university example by default. You can change this by editing the "build.properties" file.
You can bypass the scripts and use Ant directly if you specify the necessary properties on the command line, i.e., if you have installed the examples in, say, c:\temp\bframe-examples and <b-frame/> in d:\tools\b-frame, you may execute
ant -buildfile d:\tools\b-frame\build.xml -Dapp.name=university -Dapp.pwd=C:\tools\b-frame deploy
This example also demonstrates how to override the application name
without editing "build.properties".
2. Customization of Masks
Previous <b-frame/> versions deduced the fields appearing on a mask from the corresponding table, e.g. a tasks's select list consists of the table's primary key attributes. This is a good default solution and may be sufficient in some cases, but in general the fields appearing on a mask should be customizable. This has been achieved by introducing the <bf-app:group> and <bf-app:field> for the <b-frame/> application descriptor. As an example consider the following task definition from the university application.
<bf-app:task table="institute">
<bf-app:task table="professor">
<bf-app:group type="list">
<bf-app:field name="id" label="ID"/>
<bf-app:field name="name" label="Name" link="true"/>
</bf-app:group>
<bf-app:task table="course">
<bf-app:group type="list">
<bf-app:field name="id" label="ID"/>
<bf-app:field name="title" label="Title" link="true"/>
</bf-app:group>
<bf-app:task name="student_list" table="visit"/>
</bf-app:task>
</bf-app:task>
</bf-app:task>
Note the following:
A new introductory text is available at http://www.b-frame.org/introduction/index.html
The tutorial at http://www.b-frame.org/applications.pdf has been updated.
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