New stuff for Openbravo ERP developers

Recently modularity project has been merged back to Openbravo ERP 2.50 trunk. Apart from the features described within the project, some other useful utilities have been developed, these features are usable from r2.50 by any development. Some of them are:

GenericTree

GenericTree allows to represent an ajax tree for any tree data structure in Openbravo ERP. It draws the user interface for the tree and manages the ajax calls for opening and closing nodes.

GenericTree is an abstract Java class that can be extended by other classes to implement different trees. These subclasses just need to populate a FieldProvider object with the information for the concrete tree. Once this is done in order to show an ajax tree it is only needed to instantiate a subclass.

Let’s see some code:

This is the Java piece of code

ModuleTree tree = new ModuleTree(this);
tree.setLanguage(vars.getLanguage());
//Obtains a tree for the installed modules
xmlDocument.setParameter("moduleTree", tree.toHtml());
//Obtains a box for display the modules descriptions
xmlDocument.setParameter("moduleTreeDescription", tree.descriptionToHtml());


And here is the HTML side


<tr>
<PARAMETER_TMP id="moduleTree"/> <!-- Prints module tree 4 cols -->
<td/>
<td/>
<tr>

…

<tr>
<PARAMETER_TMP id="moduleTreeDescription"/> <!-- Prints module tree desc  4 cols -->
<td/>
<td/>
<tr>


In this example ModuleTree class is a GenericTree’s subclass which implements the queries for the tree of modules, creating a new instance of this class and setting the toHTML() in the HTML template will display the User Interface and manage all the ajax requests.

FieldProviderFactory

This class allows to transform any object with setter methods into a FieldProvider object. This is useful to represent this non-FieldProvider object within a structure inside a xmlEngine template.

Here’s the code:


WebServiceImplServiceLocator loc = new WebServiceImplServiceLocator();
WebServiceImpl ws = (WebServiceImpl) loc.getWebService();
Module module = ws.moduleDetail(recordId);
ModuleDependency[] dependencies = module.getDependencies();
xmlDocument.setData("dependencies", FieldProviderFactory.getFieldProviderArray(dependencies));


In this example ModuleDependency is a class that has setter methods, so to use it to fill a HTML template it is possible to convert it into a FieldProvider using FieldProviderFactory class.

AntExecutor

AntExecutor is able to execute any ant task from any build.xml file. It is also possible to set different loggers, for example a file log or an OBPrintStream which can be used to display the generated log in real time.

This is a basic example that just creates a new AntExecutor for a buil.xml file, adds a task and a property and executes the task.


AntExecutor ant=new AntExecutor("/path/to/build.xml");
Vector tasks = new Vector();
tasks.add("apply.modules");
ant.setProperty("module", "test1");
ant.runTask(tasks);


Zip

Zip class zips and unzips files.

It is easy to use:


Zip.zip("/path/to/zip/", "/file/to.zip");
Zip.unzip("/file/to/un.zip", "/path/to/unzip");


First modularity merge to trunk

I have merged the first part of modularity project into trunk. This does no add any new functionality, it just contains the new database infrastructure to manage modules which includes a table (AD_Module) to maintain the installed modules in the instance and a reference to this table in many application dictionary tables (you can see the complete list of the affected tables here).

The purpose of this early merge is to try to affect other projects for r2.50 as llittle as possible but, in any case, it would be advisable to synchronize these projects with trunk as soon as possible in order to minimize the risk of conflicts.