Re: ofbiz ide

[David E. Jones]

-David


On Apr 5, 2007, at 4:27 AM, Christopher Snow wrote:

So the difference between #2 and #3 in your list would be that #2 writes out the XML files directly, while #3 would do so through an API? There is a bit of both right now in the OFBiz framework APIs. The Entity Engine, for example, was at one point used with full round- tripping quite a bit, but using a template to generate the XML. At the time the template was a JSP, which was a pain, so now using FTL would make it a lot easier and cleaner. The general approach in the past was to keep the data in memory in their natural objects, and then write templates to write XML files from those objects. This sort of API to support an IDE plugin or other tools has been discussed a bit, and there are various extensions to the current code you'll probably need. In general you'll want to start with the ofbiz-component.xml files (finding them through the chain of component-load.xml files, starting with the one in framework/base/config). Those files have all of the main resources information in them, though from a tool perspective there is a lot of data to load, and a lot that references other things that you'll want to keep track of for navigation aids and such. In any case, this is something that I (and probably many others) would like to see move forward, so as you run into operations you need to do for getting/setting data in OFBiz, please make some noise on this mailing list and we'll see who can pitch in.

I'm currently creating a basic eclipse plugin prototype of an ofbiz- ide.

The plugin will need to manipulate ofbiz metadata (definitions of
components/entity/service/etc).  The options:


reading/writing metadata


the metadata directly using the same code that ofbiz uses for reading
the metadata on startup.

3) add an API to ofbiz for manipulating the metadata that the plugin
would use while ofbiz is running, e.g.

   ComponentDef myComponent =
      OfbizComponent.createComponentDef(String componentName ...);
   EntityDef myEntity = myComponent.createEntityDef( ... );
   etc.


in the ide.

Any comments appreciated.  Thanks in advance ...

Chris

1) ignore existing ofbiz code base and create separate plugin logic for 2) extract the ofbiz code (Start.init(), etc) to read/write the metadata without requiring ofbiz to be running so that the plugin can manipulate option (1) will be the quickest to start with, but will result in a lot of duplicate code if metadata such as autorelations are to be displayed

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