Hello,

We have been working very hard to get the new version of Quick Objects ready for release. An earlier post here shows some of the feature enhancements in the new version of Quick Objects Designer. However, it does not cover a completely new feature being introduced.

Quick Objects Designer V5 now allows you to specify screen layouts and then use template based code generation to generate your UI layer. This is not a cookie cutter UI generation tool that produces screens that cannot be modified or customized. Rather, we built this from the ground up to reduce the UI development time and eliminate tedious and time consuming process of creating layouts, binding controls, performing validation, and exchanging values to/from controls with business objects or data access layers.

Best of all the code generation engine can be used to generate code for these layouts in any type of language/platform. Bundled template generates xml format compatible with the WebXmlForm. You can connect the screen layouts to business objects that are based on a table or a view.


Figure 1: List of screens in a given project.

The layout designer is flexible and configurable, and the ability to plug in custom controls or controls from third party is available as well. In addition, you can also map a certain type to a certain control. This mapping allows you to simply drop a “field” onto the screen, and the designer will automatically create the controls and bind it with the field. The controls can be container controls or regular data entry controls, Grid or ComboBox etc.


Figure 2: Configured controls are available in the layout designer.

Configured controls can be easily organized in groups as well.


Figure 3: Control properties/attributes.

Some of the features:

• Drag and drop a control, then drop a field onto it to bind the field to the control.

• Specify control properties or specify custom attributes that can be used by code generation templates.

• Specify Role Based Access information, currently this information is used by the Web Xml Form from the generated xml to show/hide/enable/disable controls based on the user’s role. Custom UI code generation templates can be created with easy, and they can leverage any of the rolbe based access information or custom attributes.
  

• Create complex layouts by embedding any new layout within a cell, combination of cells or the entire row.

• Drag and Drop a ComboBox type control, then drop the field to bind the SelectedValue property. Then drop the object that will be used as the Lookup Table. Then drag and drop the fields that will be used for the Value and Display of the lookup items.

Figure 4

Layout designer provides the full object hierarchy including fields and joins in a Tree View making it very easy to access and connect object(s) or their field(s) to a particular control.

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