OraTransplant

Screenshots of JDeveloper plugins

28 June 2005 at 20:20 CEST | In Designer, Designer to JDeveloper, JDeveloper, Oracle |

About two weeks ago I wrote a blog entry about a presentation of Jules de Ruijter of Centraal Boekhuis. They decided to drop Designer as a tool and move all design information from the repository to flat ASCII files managed/edited by JDeveloper and versioned by CVS. They create some plug-ins for JDeveloper to edit/manage these files.

To my surprise the homepage of OTN had a link to this entry for about a week. The number of visitors to my site increased by some 800%!

The presentation was originally in Dutch, but with all the attention Jules was so kind to translate it to English. He also wrote a very informational comment at the previous blog entry explaining in more detail what the plug-ins do. He has now even send me some screenshots to demonstrate their use of JDeveloper. See below for the screenshots and some explanation.

Navigator and custom actions
The first screenshot show how Centraal Boekhuis organized all the ASCII files. They use a normal folder/subdirectory structure to organize the files by business process/unit (Technical, Business planning, Marketing and Sales, Process Development, etc.), Design Area (Business Model, Data Model, System Design, etc) and Application System (ASSBEH - Assortment- and stockmanagement). So far, that’s all default JDeveloper. The only thing they added are some custom actions; Create New Object, Rename Object, Delete Object, Show Versions, Navigate Back and Search Object. Some of these are for shortcomings of CVS (e.g. rename/delete objects), but there is also a very interesting one: Show Versions shows the actual installed version in the different databases (Production, Test, Development).

Custom tabs in the Editor
The second screenshots shows the extra tabs they created in JDeveloper using the SDK. You can see the normal Source tab of JDeveloper. Notice the little tag “--<cbcode>” at line 2. This seperates the documentation from the actual code. I personally found this a simple yet brilliant idea. By combining the documentation and the code in a single ASCII file they are always stored (and versioned!) together. The three new custom tabs Doc, Code and Test all show only that section of the overall text file. The user/developer can just edit these three parts separately in the tabs, yet it is still combined in one overall ASCII file visible on the first tab.

Network diagram in structure pane
The next two screenshots shows the relationships between all objects. Centraal Boekhuis found out that the relationships (Implements/Implemented By, Calls/Called By, Owns, Owned By, etc) between all Designer objects themselves are valuable information. It’s very hard to maintain this information in the ASCII files. That’s why they’ve extracted this information from Designer and stored in some simple database tables. Then they created another plug-in to JDeveloper to show and edit these relationships in the structure pane of JDeveloper. There is a popup menu with common actions; Delete Relationship, Change Relationship and Navigate Back.

Changing a relationship
The final screenshots show the dialog for changing a relationship

Full screenshots
All the pictures above where parts of the original screenshots Jules de Ruijter mailed me. You can click in the thumbnails below to show the original full-size screenshots. Be aware that they might be too large to show on your screen and your webbrowser might shrink them. If you’re using MS Internet Explorer look for an overlayed button at the righthand size of the image to restore it to its full size.