Application components

This page lists and explains how to quickly create the components of an application in Semarchy xDM.

Application components

Once the new application is created, designers can start creating the various components of the application:

  • Reusable components attached to the entities:

    • Display cards to define how entity data appear in compact form.

    • Forms to define how a single entity record appears.

    • Collections to define how multiple entity records appear.

    • Search forms to define how to search and filter entity records.

    • Steppers to define how records in entities are authored.

    • Duplicate managers to define how duplicate records are manually managed.

    • Action sets to define groups of data management actions available for entities.

    • Business views composed of related entities, using the forms, collection, display cards, and search forms to display and search data.

  • Reusable components attached to the model:

  • Application components:

You can create each of these components individually. You can also accelerate this process with the Create Application Components wizard.

It is possible to create different business views, collections, and forms for specific purposes, or to use advanced capabilities (particularly the Visible flags) to hide or show parts of these graphical components contextually.

The Create Application Components wizard

The Create Application Components wizard accelerates the creation of the various application components required to browse and manage a given entity.

To automatically create application components for an entity:

  1. Right-click the entity node and select Creation Application Components.

  2. On the first page of the wizard:

    • Select an existing display card or select <Create New> to create a new one using the values provided in the second step of the wizard.

    • Select an existing form, a collection, and an action set, or select <Create New> to optionally create new instances of these items for the entity.

    • Select Enable Authoring to create a stepper and the various authoring actions for your entity.

    • Select Enable Duplicate Management (for a fuzzy-matched entity) to create a duplicate manager and the various duplicate management actions for your entity.

    • Select Create Business View to automatically create a business view.

    • Select an application in the Show In field into which the business view will be used.

  3. Click Next.

  4. On the second page of the wizard, you can edit the display card selected on the first page or define the properties for a new display card:

    • Use the SemQL editor to define the Primary Text Expression as well as the Secondary Text Expression.

    • Select a Primary Image and an Avatar from the image libraries. You can also define these using SemQL expressions.

  5. Click Finish to close the wizard.

The wizard automatically performs the following operations:

  • It creates a new display card or updates the selected one with the values entered in the second step of the wizard.

  • It optionally creates a collection using that display card. The collection supports automatically the list, table and grid views depending on the display card content:

    • The list uses two lines if the display card has a secondary text, and shows an avatar if the display card has a value for the avatar.

    • The table uses two lines if the display card has a secondary text, and contains all the attributes defined for the entity.

    • The grid view is configured if a primary image is configured in the display card. It uses two lines if the display card has a secondary text.

  • It optionally creates a form with a single tab, which contains one field per attribute defined for the entity. Included attributes are:

    • The ID attribute expression

    • The following user-defined attributes in their order in the entity:

    • Atomic attributes

    • Complex atomic attributes: The complex type is therefore decomposed.

    • FDN attributes (and not FIDs)

  • If the Enable Authoring option was selected, a stepper is created with a root collection step and a form step using the collection and form selected or created by the wizard.

  • If the Enable Duplicate Management option was selected, a duplicate manager is created using the collection and form selected or created by the wizard.

  • An action set with all common actions (export, etc.), all possible authoring actions (edit, create, import, etc.) if Enable Authoring was selected, and all possible duplicate management actions if Enable Duplicate Management was selected. Authoring and duplicate management actions use the stepper and duplicate managers previously created.

  • A business view with a single level using the collection, form, display card, and action set previously created.

  • The business view is added to the selected application.

You can also accelerate the design of applications by duplicating objects such as the business views, forms, collections, and search forms.