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Tutorial: Working with the Control Center

Posted Thu, 01 Apr 2010 - 20:42 by admin


Introduction

The Developer Control Center is a central point of access to a variety of information about your application and projects. Control Center uses the embedded Internet Explorer to display rich text documents with hyperlinks to internal functionality and other web pages. While many default views are provided, it is highly configurable and can simplify many day-to-day tasks.

The Control Center is not meant to replace your general use of an Internet browser, it is just a convenient method of displaying important pages. It also demonstrates the use of Internet Explorer embedded in a business application.


Adding Page Tabs

There are tabs at the top of the screen design to display web pages useful in your application development and maintenance work. To add additional tabs, edit your local developer profile (buildpro/bin/xdevprofile_user.xml). Control Center tabs are configured under UserProfile / ControlCenter / Views. You can add as many tabs as required - 15-20 will be visible, others will accessible by scrolling to the right.

For each tab, specify a URL to a page resource which can include:

  • http:// - any local or remote web page (i.e. http://cnn.com).
  • file:// - any local file (i.e. file://c:\buildpro\readme.txt).
  • bp:// - any of the support internal BuildProfessional Developer actions (described below).

Add a descriptive label and the specify Autoload=True or False. For external pages or anything using frames use Autoload=True. The Autoload option must be False to process internal bp:// URLs.

For example add the following to your list of Views:

<View Label="News" Source="http://cnn.com/" Autoload="True"/>
<View Label="Search" Source="http://www.google.com/" Autoload="True"/>
<View Label="Readme" Source="file://c:\buildpro\readme.txt" Autoload="False"/>

Save the xml file and restart your developer session. The above three tabs will be added.


Simple Control Views


Accessing Your Intranet


One good way to use the Control Center is to pre-define views into your Intranet. This could be a project management page, outstanding bug reports, or support requests. In this situation attempt to link directly to the relevant pages rather than the Intranet start-page.


Developer Control Center


By default the first tab is the Control Center main view. This view provides an update on application development activity including:

  • Information on the Developer Service: who is currently logged on, the RepositoryPath and request service status.
  • Currently active job ids. Locally defined Job Id's are listed. To start work on one of the Job Id's, simply click click on the link.
  • Recently modified components. If you just logged on to work on recently edited components, you will find them all listed by component type. Clicking on the link will bring up that component in its editor.

     

Component Activity Details.

The Activity view displays components updated in the past 30 days (or as configured in the URL defined in your developer profile). Click on any of the components to view the component in the editor.


Application Overview


If your application is still relatively small, you can get a complete overview of all components in the application. The maximum number of components displayed per type is controlled in the URL.


Advanced Control Views

More advanced views can be created by using the internal bp:// URLs into web pages. The internal bp:// URLs are only available in the the Control Center and are processed internally by the Developer. By building your own pages and using the internal bp:// URLs, you can open components, run applications and view component access details.

Take the following example (save the below contents to a local file and reference it in Control View):

<html>
<body>
<h1>Test bphrx Run Environments</h1>
<p><a href="bp://dev?action=goto&componenttype=Application&componentname=bphrx">Switch to Application bphrx</a></p>
<blockquote>
<h3><a href="bp://xdev?action=run&environment=Standard&debug=False">Run Application</a></h3>
<h3><a href="bp://xdev?action=run&environment=Standard&debug=True">Debug Application</a></h3>
<h3><a href="bp://xdev?action=runlogic&debug=false&environment=Standard&componenttype=Function&componentname=test">Run function &quot;test&quot;</a></h3>
<h3><a href="bp://xdev?action=runlogic&debug=false&environment=Standard&componenttype=Process&componentname=Rebuild">Run process &quot;Rebuild&quot; to rebuild data files</a></h3>
</blockquote>
</body>
</html>

The five links will:

  1. Switch you to the bphrx Application
  2. Run the application
  3. Run the application in debug mode
  4. Run the test function
  5. Run the Rebuild process

Options using Internal URLs

All bp:// URLs begin with "xdev?" and then parameter and value pairs.

The "action" parameters are:

  • controlcenter - the main Control Center view.
     
  • activity - displays component activity over the specified number of days. Requires days parameter.
     
  • overview - display all components of all types. Requires count parameter.
     
  • goto - Opens a component in its editor and shifts focus to that view. If the componenttype is "Application", the Developer will switch to that application. Requires componenttype and componentname.
     
  • open - Opens a component (leaving the view in the Control Center). Use to open many components at once. Requires componenttype and componentname.
     
  • delete - Deletes a component. Requires componenttype and componentname.
     
  • setjob - Set a current Job Id. Requires jobid parameter.
     
  • run - Runs the current application using the specified environment. Optional environment and debug (True/False) parameters.
     
  • runclient - Runs the current application using the Windows Client. Optional environment and debug (True/False) parameters.
     
  • runlogic - Run the a logic component in the current application. Optional environment, debug (True/False). Requires componenttype and componentname parameters.
     
  • runclientlogic - Run the a logic component in the current application using the Windows Client. Optional environment, debug (True/False). Requires componenttype and componentname parameters.
     
  • ri - Executes a Repository Instruction and applies a specified XSL Transformation that would result in a displayable HTML page. Requires ri and xsl parameters which point to URLs for the the repository instruction and xslt.


Examples


Use the following URLs: to launch applications:

  • bp://xdev?action=run&environment=Default*debug=False
  • bp://xdev?action=runlogic&environment=Default&debug=False&componenttype=Function&componentname=test

Use the following to delete the function test:

  • bp://xdev?action=delete&componenttype=Function&componentname=test

Working with Repository Instructions

The example "My View" Control Center tab executes a local Repository Instruction to retrieve components modified in the current Job Id. Once the instruction has been processed, the view results are transformed to an HTML page.

The request file can be viewed from your local system at http://localhost/bpxml/myview.xml and the transformation is at http://localhost/bpxml/myview.xsl. These files can also be located in the buildpro/web/bpxml directory.

You can copy and edit these files to customize the request or page display format. For example you could create a page allowed you to quickly delete items modified under the current Job Id using the "delete" parameter as defined above.


Example


Add the following view to display an always up-to-date selection file (q-file) of your current Job Id:
 


<View Label="My View" Source="bp://xdev?action=ri&amp;ri=http://localhost/bpxml/myview.xml&amp;xsl=http://localhost/bpxml/qfile.xsl" Autoload="False"/>

Download the qfile.xsl and place it in your buildpro/web/bpxml directory.