IBM Software Group
Rational Business Developer
EGL Rich UI Development
®
© 2009 IBM Corporation

 © Copyright IBM Corporation 2007,2008. All rights reserved.
 The information contained in these materials is provided for informational purposes only, and is provided AS IS without warranty of any kind, express or implied. IBM shall not be responsible for any damages arising out of the use of, or otherwise related to, these materials. Nothing contained in these materials is intended to, nor shall have the effect of, creating any warranties or representations from IBM or its suppliers or licensors, or altering the terms and conditions of the applicable license agreement governing the use of IBM software. References in these materials to IBM products, programs, or services do not imply that they will be available in all countries in which IBM operates.
 This information is based on current IBM product plans and strategy, which are subject to change by IBM without notice. Product release dates and/or capabilities referenced in these materials may change at any time at IBM’s sole discretion based on market opportunities or other factors, and are not intended to be a commitment to future product or feature availability in any way.
 IBM, the IBM logo, the on-demand business logo, Rational, the Rational logo, and other IBM Rational products and services are trademarks or registered trademarks of the International Business Machines Corporation, in the United States, other countries or both. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.
2 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Scott Pecnik, Chris Laffra and Jon Sayles – primary content and courseware developers
 Ancillary contributors:
 William Smythe/IBM, Brian Svihovec/IBM, Michael Virga/IBM, Yann Lerouzic/Morpheus
Consulting, U.K., Mike Brouwers of ASIST, Kendall Coolidge, Nick Leonessa,
Oleg Arsky/Synchrony Systems, Daniel Beauregard, CCB Associates, Inc.,
Arco van der Velden/Synobsys Nederland B.V., Ulf Buchner/Synobsys Nederland B.V.,
© 2009 IBM Corporation 3

 Audience
 This course is designed for application developers who have programmed in a
3 rd or 4 th generation language – and who need to build Web 2.0/Rich User
Interface applications using EGL.
 Prerequisites
 Basic PC and mouse-driven development skills are assumed.
 It is assumed that you have taken the EGL Foundation Class, and have a comfortable understanding of eclipse, the EGL language, SQL, services
(including Web Services) and web technology

Alternatively, if you have the equivalent EGL work experience doing production dynamic content web application development using Eclipse, EGL and web applications that should be sufficient
 An understanding of basic HTML is helpful
 HTML syntax

HTML tables
 HTML components such as input fields, radio buttons, etc.
4 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
RBD/EGL Development
Units:
 What is Web 2.0?
 Programming in EGL Rich UI
 Learn EGL Rich UI
 Appendix
5 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 The term “Web 2.0” was first coined by
O’Reilly Media in 2003.
 It was then popularized by the first Web 2.0 conference in 2004.
 The term implies a new version of the internet, but that is not the case
 According to Tim O'Reilly,
 "Web 2.0 is the business revolution in the computer industry caused by the move to the internet as platform , and an attempt to understand the rules for success on that new platform.“
 Moral: Web 2.0 is not really all that new
6 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Web 2.0
is a term often applied to a perceived ongoing transition of the World Wide Web from a collection of websites to a full-fledged computing platform serving web applications to end users.
Ultimately Web 2.0 services are expected to replace desktop computing applications for many purposes.
Web 2.0 is becoming synonymous with RIA (Rich Internet
Application)
Source: http://alexzelder.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/google_l ogo1.jpg
Expectations
© 2009 IBM Corporation 7

 An important trend in delivering software applications
 An enabler for rich er web applications
 New business models
 Peer-to-peer user participation
 New technologies
 Interactive filtering, presentation, data entry
 A combination of core technology components
 Rich user experience (maps, grids, animation, D&D, etc)
 Loosecoupling, composite applications via reuse and “mash-ups”
 Standards (SOAP, REST, JSON, Atom, etc)
8 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Web 2.0 technologies highlight the next pendulum swing between client and server function.
TUI
“Dumb” little green screen clients
Omnipotent big mainframe servers
CUI
JSF
Rich
UI
“Smart” Personal Computer clients
Simple file and database servers
Light Web Browser clients
Rich application and database servers
Rich Internet Application clients
Lighter application and database servers
9 © 2009 IBM Corporation










10 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Refers to the design and development pattern of combining and custom “widgets” in a web application.
The rendered web application mashes-up (contains) relevant and related views of data on-screen for effective presentation
Google Map
Hotel information
— separate database
Directions — come from somewhere else
Send to a phone
—
Additional functionality
Why?
 Rapid application development
 Reuse existing services
 Avoid reinventing the wheel
 Empowers users
11

“Mashups”
– 2 of 2
Mash-ups can also be loosely related views

Think of a
“Portal” consisting of many combined mini-pages, instead of a single-purpose web page like:

Login
 Registration
 etc.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 12

Rich User
Experience
Lightweight
Programming
Model
Info-ware
AJAX incorporating: XHTML and CSS, DOM, XML and XSLT,
XMLHttpRequest and JavaScript allowing information to be mashed up into new interactive portals."
XML or JSON data over HTTP , in a lightweight approach sometimes referred to as REST (Representational State
Transfer) as an alternative to SOAP.
“DATA is the new HTML."
Database management is a core competency of Web 2.0 companies.
Feeds
Perpetual Beta
RSS/ATOM allows someone to link not just to a page, but to subscribe to it, with notification every time that page changes.
Users must be treated as co-developers, in a reflection of open source development practices. The open source dictum,
"release early and release often”
13 © 2009 IBM Corporation


Web 2.0
websites are often based on community
 Some examples of Web 2.0 sites are: Facebook,
Digg, Yelp, and Twitter (see slide ***Notes for url’s)
 All of the above web sites rely on the community to submit content.
 A Web 2.0 community-based site you are probably familiar with
 http://www-949.ibm.com/software/rational/cafe/community/egl
© 2009 IBM Corporation 14

 With Rich UI, your business applications can have the unmatched speed and usability of client side (browserbased) applications, while still being served and managed from centralized, dynamic content server applications: http://www.visualthesaurus.com/index.jsp

Additional examples include:
 http://www.adobe.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/examples/
 http://www.visokio.com/demos/camerafinder
 http://www.smartmoney.com/map-of-the-market/
© 2009 IBM Corporation 15

 Because of the RBD tooling, programming-model and loose-coupling in the
EGL implementation of Rich UI – Software Reuse is not only easy:
 EGL Rich UI application design tends towards reuse – as all interfaces are formally declared
 EGL Rich UI encourages functional decomposition:

From highlevel (through differentiated file types) …to…low-level (“everything is a function that takes parameters”) – making it next to impossible to write in a monolithic programming style
 Developers will choose reuse over re-write, as the tools and language accommodate this
 Software projects will benefit
– as over time the R.O.I. for reuse will make it difficult to justify writing “brand-spanking-new”
Rich UI
Application External RIA
Application
Existing
RUIHandler
New
RUIHandler
New and
Existing
RUIWidgets
External
JavaScript
Existing
Widget
© 2009 IBM Corporation
RUIHandler
Elements
Existing
Widget
16
New
Widget


EGL Rich UI is a really simple and powerful way to quickly implement a Web 2.0 application. Here are the main advantages:
 No need to know Java, Java Script or HTML: everything can be written in pure EGL language. This language has a simple and clear syntax, independent from any other existing language and can be learnt in one or two weeks (may be a bit longer to be able to master the Rich UI-specific parts).
 If needed, JavaScript and HTML can still be used to extend the EGL Rich UI features: for example, I wrote some JavaScript functions to manage character strings in a more complex manner than the basic EGL string library does. New JavaScript code has to be wrapped into an EGL object to be reused, which means that a JavaScript developer can write a whole new library of functions for an EGL developer who does not need to know anything about JavaScript.
 Writing a Web 2.0 application is usually a daunting task, since you have to write HTML parts, manipulate a lot of JavaScript functions to make them interact, and these parts are not managed as a whole: you have to cope with every little bit of HTML to make the application work. Instead, EGL Rich UI is all about working with components, or widgets, that you just have to assemble in a simple way to build an application, such as you would for a traditional client application (basically, you work with EGL Rich UI in the same manner as you work with Java Swing).

Each component can be graphically designed and tested, which is a lot faster than creating HTML code and testing it with JavaScript events.

Each component can be reused without having to design it again: we use CSS stylesheets to define the style and presentation of a widget. Furthermore, the newly created components can be integrated into the EGL Widgets palette so that other people can reuse them graphically into their own application. IBM provides its own basic EGL components from which more complex components can be built.

The components are totally independent: they communicate by an "InfoBus", which is a central component of an EGL Rich UI application. Widgets publish events to the InfoBus (e.g. a click on a button) and any other component in the application can subscribe to these events to retrieve and process them.

EGL Rich UI can easily be extended by wrapping Dojo or Silverlight AJAX objects into EGL objects: for example, this can be interesting to reuse already developed AJAX widgets that a customer would like to see in his new application

An MVC framework is provided in order to be able to quickly generate validating forms (which is the case in the Fulfillment application for the address asked to the customer when he wants to checkout)
 An EGL Rich UI can easily interact and exchange data with other web applications: every needed feature is provided to access SOAP or REST web services. Accessing a web service basically just consists in writing a line declaring the web service in a configuration file. From there, the web service can be accessed in EGL just as you would access a function in a local library.
 Finally, an EGL Rich UI applications is just one full web page: there are no interactions between the server and the client, except when calling web services. Every update in the GUI is done locally, whereas in traditional Web applications (Java/JSP, ASP.NET, ...) there are a lot of data exchanges. The server can then serve much more clients.

All these advantages together form a major improvement on how we can write Web 2.0 applications. I developed a number of components that we'll be able to reuse in future developments to drastically reduce development time.
17 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Rich Internet Application technology is an element of (in fact, the enabler of the)
Web 2.0 experience
 RIA technology promises to raise the standard of internet use, providing customers with a more “human or interactive” experience, and including large-grain (new) functional capabilities such as:
 Running software applications entirely on the browser
 “Social networking” and web-”participation” – through interactive technologies such as
“wikis” and collaborative forums
 The ability to combine and merge content from diverse (client and server-side) sources
(these are known as “mash-ups”)
 For additional reading on Web 2.0, RIA and underlying languages and technologies
– please visit these URLs:
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_2
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rich_Internet_application
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AJAX
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JavaScript
 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Event-driven_programming
 http://www.quirksmode.org/dom/intro.html
18 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Web 2.0 and Rich UI
Units:
 EGL Rich UI – Terms and Concepts
 Programming in EGL Rich UI
 Learn EGL Rich UI
 Appendix
19 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Rich UI stands for R ich U ser I nterface.
 This is a phrase commonly used when talking about an interface that provides dynamic rendering of its individual parts
– notably, on the client-browser, as opposed to server-side processing
 It is a technology that will allow developers of any background to create rich web pages like one would see on a leading-edge, Web 2.0 sites:
 www.digg.com
 www.hulu.com
…others discussed in the previous section…
 Rich Internet Application (RIA) – is often used synonymously with Rich UI
 The benefits of Rich UI have a lot to do with Web 2.0 benefits, and include:
 Improved user-responsiveness
 The most successful Rich UI implementations can achieve almost a “Windows-desktop” look and feel to users
 “Rich-er” functionality – beyond the simple rendering of HTML, to include dynamic widgets and components
 Improved browser/server load-balancing – as more of the business functionality can be distributed to the desktop (browsers)
20 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Rich UI leverages the generation capabilities of EGL to generate JavaScript
 JavaScript is a language that runs in a browser, (FireFox, Internet Explorer,
Opera, etc.) – not on the server like EGL-generated COBOL or Java
 It is JavaScript that renders your page in the browser and manipulates labels, data, graphics and controls the page’s behavior
 No static HTML is created
 EGL generated JavaScript does all the work
 Rich UI supports all the base EGL language constructs like libraries and records, while hiding the complexity of Web 2.0 functionality
 Much of the U.I. is implemented using leading-edge internet technologies such as (all terms we will be defining shortly) :
 AJAX
 DOJO
 JSON
 FLEX
 Web Services
21 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Widget Writer
UI Produce
IBM
ISVs EGL
Widget
Library
Consume
Data + Logic
JavaScript
AJAX
Dojo
Google
REST XML
SOAP JSON
SOAP
XML
REST
PHP
COBOL
Java RPG
SQL
EGL
22 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 On the EGL Café – in the EGL Rich UI hub: http://www-949.ibm.com/software/rational/cafe/community/egl/rui
…IBM is providing a wealth of:
 Examples
 Focused documentation
 Commentary
 Links
© 2009 IBM Corporation 23



1. RESTful service calls – A call made through the HTTP service-interface.
Once the call is made, a result is passed back to the requestor in XML or JSON format.
2. SOAP service calls - A type of service call that is more popular in enterprise. It requires the exchange of XML messages between the client and host system.
Server-Side
Enterprise
Computing
Assets
JDBC
Calls
…or…
Services
EGL
Server-Side
Application
Resources
Service
Calls
…and…
Results
Rich UI
Application
 By utilizing web services you build modular, scalable systems.
24 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 AJAX – Stands for Asynchronous JavaScript and XML. Rich UI makes extensive
(almost wholesale) use of AJAX, utilizing it whenever it makes a service call.
Rich UI never executes a traditional HTML or .JSP page “Form Submit”.
 Widget – A widget is a generic term for a graphical element in a GUI or Internet style interface. Most widgets allow for the interaction and manipulation of data in the browser.
EGL Widget
DOJO Widget
 DOJO – An open source JavaScript toolkit. The DOJO project sets out to create widgets using only JavaScript. Rich UI is able to interface with DOJO code in order to pull in some of their widgets. http://dojotoolkit.org/
25 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 JSON – JavaScript Object Notation is lightweight format used by JavaScript to exchange data. JSON is able to serialize structured data, such as arrays, and exchange it among host and client machines.
 Silverlight – is a new technology developed by Microsoft that is similar to
Macromedia’s Flash. Rich UI is able to interact with, and integrate with Silverlight widgets in your application:
26 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Found under \WebContent\
Widget Properties: class
 A Cascading Style Sheet is a file composed of one to many “classes” which are labeled declarations of related HTML tags
 A .css class is defined for a widget (like a TextLabel) in it class property
Classes inside of a
 .CSS tags are applied in the browser (at run-time)
Cascading Style Sheet
 Cascading Style Sheets are used to make web pages U.I.:
 Consistent
 Easy to develop
 Easy to maintain (a change definition propagates to all widgets that refer to the tag
© 2009 IBM Corporation 27

 Request/Response Lifecycle :
Uniform Resource Locator
 Connect to a TCP/IP network:
 Through your ISP - internet
 Through an intranet/extranet
 Enter a logical URL/URI address
– press “GO” in the browser to make a request:
 www.amazon.com
 A global-database receives the request
 And resolves the logical address into a physical address of a server that can respond to the request by either:
 Serving a page
 Passing the request to an application that can respond (dynamic data content web application)
 If a dynamic content application, your EGL JSFHandler eventually gets control of the request (through a JSF framework), and processes it
 And returns data (bound to JSF components) which end up processed by the JSF framework
(Java) classes
– which emits HTML and sends a response (reply) back to the user’s PC
© 2009 IBM Corporation 28

 Uniform Resource Locator ( URL ) is a technical, internet-term used as a synonym for Uniform
Resource Identifier (URI) – which is used by your browser to access and retrieve:
 Documents, Pages, Graphics
…from a unique address of a network-based application or web server connected to the internet
Here is a sample URI dissected: http://www.ibm.com
 “ http:// ” tells the web browser to make a request on port 80 of type HTTP.
 “ www ” tells the browser to connect to a DNS (Domain Name Server) on the world wide web.
 Once connected to the DNS server, the hypertext, or “ ibm.com
” is resolved to an IP address. This IP address is returned to the client browser which then makes a direct connection to the web server .
Here is a more interesting URI:
 http://localhost:5590/EGLRichUI/mysamples/ruiPropertySample.html?contextKey=5
• localhost:5590 = “this computer” listens on port 5590 (default for RUI development/Preview)
• /EGLRICHUI/ = “the root directory of the application” \WebContent\
• /mySamples/ = “launch the RUIHandler named: ruiPropertySample.html – found in the
\mySamples\ folder (directory) under \WebContent\
• contextKey=5 = “pass this RUIHandler the value 5, in a variable named: contextKey
29 © 2009 IBM Corporation

The browser (Internet Explorer, Firefox, Netscape, Mozilla, etc.).
Browser software:
 Understands and can render HTML on the user’s PC
 Understands and can execute the JavaScript generated by Rich UI
– on the user’s machine
(called “client/side” processing)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 30

There are documented operational and layout differences between the two most common browsers (IE and Firefox) – across: o Basic U.I. properties (HTML rendering and tag references) o JavaScript interpretation
I.E. 6 Browser rendering
© 2009 IBM Corporation 31

Course
Rich UI – First Steps
Units:
 Create and Configure Rich UI project

The Rich UI Environment

Hello World
 InitialUI and Children
 Deep Dive into Box’s
 Event Driven Development
 Input Controls

Data Tables
 Login Page
 Calling a Service
32 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Let’s start the tutorials by creating our very own EGL Rich UI project
 Select File  New  Project
 In the new project wizard, select EGL Project , and then click Next
33 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 The wizard should then ask you to provide a name for your project
 Type (all one word)
EGLRichUI
 Next make sure to select Rich UI Project as your project type
 Click
Finish
 The IDE will take a minute or two to create your project and set up the environment in your workspace
34 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Your workspace should now look as follows:
 The default Rich UI project was created along with your new project.
 Your newly created Rich UI project
 The com.ibm.egl.rui_1.0.0
is essentially the core of RUI. This project contains:
 RUIWidget definitions (more on these later)
 Core language functionality
 EGL Data Types
 Service Call API’s
 A Publish/Subscribe Framework called the
“InfoBus”
 A Framework for working with standard data and event management, known as:
MVC
 Event handling logic
35 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 We will be using a # of custom widgets in this training course. These custom widgets comprise learning examples and reusable components for your follow on Rich UI applications. You will need to import them from your setup folder on the desktop.
 Steps:
 File (menu)
 Import
 Other
 Project Interchange
 Select the widgets.zip file  you downloaded for this class
 A new project will be added to your workspace 
36 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Setup Your Workspace for Cross-Project Source Reference
 In order for your Rich UI project to reference source parts in other projects in your workspace, you will need to add your other projects to the EGL Build Path

 From Project Explorer:
 Right-click over EGLRichUI
 Select Properties
 From Properties > EGL Build Path
 Check the boxes for:
– EGLWeb
– com.ibm.egl.education.widgets
 Click OK
37 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Copy the Images Folder From the EGLWeb Project to the EGLRichUI Project
 In order for your projects to access images in your project, you will want some graphics files.
We’ll use the ones you have in your EGLWeb project.

 But (for expediency’s sake) you’ll need to copy these into your EGLRichUI project:
 From Project Explorer:
 Open the EGLWeb project
 Expand \WebContent\
 Select and Copy the entire \images\ sub-folder under \WebContent\
 From your EGLRichUI folder
 Expand \WebContent\
 Paste the \images\ sub-folder under \WebContent\
38 © 2009 IBM Corporation


You may have already done this, but from
Window > Preferences
 From Generation
 UN-check
Deployment
Descriptor
 Note that optionally you could check (on):
 Library
 Program
 Service
 Click OK
© 2009 IBM Corporation 39


 Let’s learn a little about what it’s like to develop using EGL Rich UI
 The workbench view you’ll be using is the EGL Rich UI Editor
 The Rich UI Editor provides: Design , Source , and Preview modes
 These three view modes are organized as sub tabs in the EGL Rich UI Editor
 The Design tab is the visual editor for Rich UI
 The Source tab is where you will go to directly edit EGL Rich UI source code
 The Preview tab is essentially a browser. This is where you will go to see what you’re pages will look like to your customers or users
 These three views are where you will spend a large majority of your time as a Rich UI developer.
 The views are organized inside the workbench in the EGL Rich UI perspective
 Recall from your previous EGL learning, that a “perspective” organizes related workbench views along the lines of developer roles and/or tasks.
 An annotated snapshot of the Rich UI perspective is shown on the next slide
40 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Similar to Web Perspective – but with different workbench views related to Web 2.0 development
Project Explorer
Content Area
Where you design your Web 2.0 applications
Code EGL Rich UI statements
Test (Preview) your work
Palette
Outline,
Properties and Events
Views
© 2009 IBM Corporation 41
Problems
&
Generation Results
Views

 RUI projects consist of three default packages: EGLSource, JavaScript, WebContent
Within each of these three packages there are:
 Sub-Packages
– to organize your project, containing:
 EGL source files and other source files:
– Cascading Style Sheet files
– Graphics (images)
 A project .eglbld file
 A project .egldd file
EGL Rich UI project source file Part types can be:
 Libraries
 externalTypes
– which can be used to call native or external
JavaScript functionality
 Handlers
 The EGL Part type used specifically for Rich UI programming – is an
EGL Handler
EGL Rich UI Handlers come in two sub-type parts:
 RUIHandler
 What we’ll call a “View” in this course
 RUIHandler of sub-type RUIWidget
 What we’ll refer to simply as a “Widget”
42 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Rich UI – First Steps
Units:
 The Rich UI Environment

Create a new project
 Rich UI Programming Fundamentals
 Web Application Layout and Design
 Event Driven Development

Input Controls
 Data Tables
 Login Page

Calling a Service
43 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 RUIHandlers are used to create Rich UI applications that are composed of one-to-many onscreen RUIWidgets. These widgets can be IBM-provided widgets, or custom widgets that you’ve created
EGL Rich UI
Elements
Cascading Style Sheet (optional property)
initialUI (initial U.I. rendering in the browser)
onConstructionFunction (initial EGL Function)
Elementary Widget (ex. textbox, button HTML, etc.)
ExternalType (provides access to native JavaScript)
…
Custom Widget – can embed reuse existing Widgets onConstructionFunction
Elementary Widget
Elementary Widget
EGL Function…
EGL Function(s)
…

RUIHandlers are referred to as “views” because they represent the visual or
“view-able” elements of your Rich UI application
44 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 From the above, note the following:
 initialUI=[Box] this Box being a RUIWidget of type box
– that contains three additional RUIWidgets:
– TextLabel
(which has some initial text)
– TextField
– Button – which has an onClick function that fires populateFields(…)
 onConstructionFunction = initialization (which in this case does nothing but could!)
 populateFields(…) EGL function
– which just initializes text in the TextField RUIWidget
 Additional properties:
 backgroundColor, width, height, columns=1
45 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 From the above, note the following:
 initialUI=[grid] – declares a grid RUIWidget inside the RUIHandler
 This grid widget contains a number of properties, all of which contribute to its look and feel:
 headerBehaviors
 margin
 data
(the individual rows)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 46

 RUIHandlers contain one-to-many RUIWidgets
 RUIWidgets can be thought of, or categorized as:
 Simple :

TextLabel
 Box
 Button
 Complex :
 mortgage Calculator
 a sort-able, select-able list of customers
 IBM provided:
 see the palette list on the right
IBM provided
RUIWidgets
 Custom :
 you create the widget
 A “ container ” widget for organizing U.I. elements:
 Box
 Div
 Tab folder
 A “ content widget ” – for data and labels, behaviors, etc.
 Most of the other widgets in the palette
 Complex RUIWidgets typically consist of both container and content widgets
 All U.I. elements in a RUIHandler are RUIWidgets
 Example: To put a basic input field onto a page, you will declare a variable of type TextField – either using the Visual Editor, or coding it using Content Assist in the EGL editor.
lNameInputField TextField {text=“LastName”};
© 2009 IBM Corporation 47

 You can add your own Custom Widgets to the Palette 
 Custom widgets often contain elementary widgets or other custom widgets
– which can contain other custom widgets, etc.
 Among other benefits, this allows you to reuse code, and to scale – or grow the U.I. in response to requirements that increase in complexity over time
© 2009 IBM Corporation 48
Note: Don’t worry too much about the syntax in this example
We’ll be covering all these language concepts in a bit

RUIWidget
.
<property>
 In EGL Rich UI, RUIWidget properties (specified within the {} following the variable declaration…a short list of which is shown here displayed through Content Assist) 
…play a huge role in the look and feel and behavior of the Widget in your application

There are an extraordinary number of properties you can customize to enable your RUI application for whatever business and U.I. requirements come at you.
In fact – it’s not much of a stretch to say that this
(virtually) unlimited programmatic access to the underlying deep-dive mechanics of each widget:
U.I.
Properties
1.
Allows you to create “un-compromising U.I.” designs – with EGL
2. Is a major difference between Rich UI and JSF (which is a Javabased framework that “hides” some of the properties you may need access to)
 Note that there are two categories of Widget properties:
1. U.I. properties – Widget layout and display
Browser
Event handling
Properties
2. Event-handling properties – that respond to Widget run-time behavior in the browser
49 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 To specify a RUIWidget property or event is very simple:
 U.I. property example – Set the text value and background color of a TextField widget inside of the initial EGL function of RUIWidget or RUIHandler:
Just code: variableName.property = value
 Browser event property example – After the user enters data in a field and tabs out, execute a function to validate the data value entered:
Just code a reference to an EGL function
The function in the RUIHandler must be declared with an input Event as a parameter.
After that? It’s all stock EGL syntax

50 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Is figuratively represented by…
© 2009 IBM Corporation 51

myTopBox myBox02 myBox03
//NOTE references to myTopBox Box
//NOTE: Properties – including what function to invoke: “onClick”
//NOTE: Properties of U.I. field
//NOTE references to U.I. elements
//NOTE: container for myBox02, myBox03
//NOTE: When clicked? Assign value
52 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 When you create a new RUIHandler with the Visual Editor you can specify properties in the Properties view.
 The property values available depend on the kind of widget
(i.e. A “Box” can have columns, A TextField can be “read only”, can have a custom font, fontSize, fontWeight, etc.)
 Some properties apply to all widgets:
 Color – for text color
 Alignment – Right/Left/Center
 Note that (none) defaults to the parent container’s alignment
 backgroundColor – for the widget’s “fill (background) color”
 id – a unique identifier for the widget
 Class – the .css file’s unique class tag

Note that in order to pick up custom .css tags, you will need to code: cssFile = “relative/fileSpec.fileName.css” – as a property of the RUIHandler
 Besides the major (common to all widget) properties, there are five additional categories of
Widget properties available from the Visual Editor for widgets:
 Border – to change the widget’s border line size and style
 Spacing – to add pixels of space between widgets
 Position – to precisely (or relatively) place a control in the browser
 Appearance – to change the color – including transparency of a widget, and to modify the cursor styling
 Accessibility – to specify user tab-key order and work with different devices
(for the handicapped)
53 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Programming in Rich UI utilizes what is called event driven development . Most run-time behavior is based on user-directed events that occur on a web page. Some of these events include:
 onClick


- mouse events
 onKeyDown
 onKeyUp

- keyboard events
 onFocusGained
 onFocusLost
 onMouseMove
 Every widget on a web page can have events defined for it
 Widgets can even have multiple events defined:
 An input TextField can have both onMouseOver (for context sensitive help)
… and onFocusLost (to validate data entry before moving to the next field)
 You specify defined events through EGL code, and from the Visual Editor
 At run-time (in the browser), widgets listen for specific user-events, which can trigger calls to your EGL functions. You code “responses” to these events inside the functions:
 Data validation
 Data access
 The responses to the events are in the form of standard EGL functions that contain EGL business logic and procedural statements (to do the data validation, data access, etc.)
 There are additional types of events you’ll learn about later in this course that are not programmatic, and not tied to user-browser interaction
© 2009 IBM Corporation 54

While the Web 2.0 event-driven programming model permits multiple events on any/every widget in a web page, in practice you will define specific event-handlers to trap specific events when they occur.
 This means that:
 When an event occurs in the browser (A User clicks a button – which fires an onClick event)
 If you have defined an EGL event-handler for that event
 And you have coded an EGL function for that event-handler
 The Rich UI framework automatically invokes the EGL function you specify to handle the event you declare
 The framework also gives you access to an
 To do things such as:
Event Record , which provides a number of properties and values that can be used in your U.I. business logic
 Detect which button was clicked: e.widget.id
 Set focus to a widget: e.widget.focus();
 Change the x/y coordinates of the widget in the browser (used for run-time
Drag & Drop operations)
HTML + JavaScript
Clicking the Multiply button fires an onClick event in the browser.
If you have an eventhandler defined for onClick the JavaScript code
(generated from your EGL) tied to the onClick event is automatically run in the browser
55 © 2009 IBM Corporation

The EGL Debugger works exactly the same for Rich UI as it does for batch EGL, and
EGL/JSF functionality
Steps:
1. Set your breakpoints (in the EGL editor’s left-hand border):
2. From Project Explorer,
Debug your EGL Rich UI Application
© 2009 IBM Corporation 56

When you Debug a Rich UI Application.
1.
Your RUIHandler will open in an external browser 
2.
Upon a defined event, the EGL function declared as that event-handler will be fired off and loaded in the Debugger for you to step-through
© 2009 IBM Corporation
You will also get to see/Debug through the EGL Widget framework code (or you can Zoom through the code, if you’re not interested)
57

Rich UI allows you to use (or reuse) existing native
JavaScript functionality

Example – call a JavaScript function defined through an EGL
ExternalType to “Google map” an address 
Fires onClick event
© 2009 IBM Corporation
Calls JavaScript function
58

 Let’s take a look at a sample application and see what it comprises:
 The above application is designed using 3 box RUIWidgets
 The outer-most box has one row and one column.
 outerBox Box {marginLeft = 45, children = [ mainContent ] };
 Inside of the outer box is an inner box with three rows and one column, the top row holds the image, the second row holds another table, and the last row holds the login button mainContent
Box {columns = 1, backgroundColor = "#C3D9FF", width = 270, roundedCorners = yes , ALIGN_CENTER = Box.ALIGN_CENTER, children = [ image, loginBox
, login ] };
 Finally, inside of the middle row is another box holding the labels and fields loginBox
Box { columns = 2, paddingLeft = 100, marginTop = 20, width = 270, children = [userNameLabel, userNameField, passwordLabel, passwordField] };
59 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Web pages created with Rich UI are extremely flexible to build and maintain
 For example, by simply changing the order in which children are assigned, a web page can be completely turned upside down
 On the previous slide, we showed that our mainContent VBox had children
 [image, loginBox, login]
 Changing the order of our children can render the following
 [loginBox, login, image]
– Note that each child is an individual widget declared just like EGL variables somewhere else in the RUIHandler
 So all it takes to create a widget is a simple variable declaration?
 Yes, and you can structure where they are displayed on the page through VBox’s and
HBox’s!
60 © 2009 IBM Corporation

How do you Invoke a Rich UI Application from a Browser or External Application?
 A deployed RUI applications URL is:
"http://<domainName>:<port>/<web project name>/<DeployedRUIHandlerName>.html
 Where domain name, port, and web project name are the same as you would specify for a web page, or .JSP page being run on an application server.
 To define the deployedRUIHandlerName value - this is the name of the 'Main View', which is really what you are deploying, and represents the root of your application
 Example Rich UI application deployed to Tomcat: http://www.ibm.com:8080/EGLRichUI/myHelloWorld.html
 Example Rich UI application being developed in RBD: http://localhost:5590/EGLRichUI/mysamples/ruiPropertySample.html?contextKey=5
 Note that you can invoke an external browser from Preview 
61 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Rich UI – First Steps
Units:
 Rich UI Programming “101” Workshops
 Creating packages and RUIHandlers

Hello World
 The Visual Editor
 Rich UI Widget Properties
 Rich UI Widget Events
62 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Let’s learn about what it’s like to develop using EGL Rich UI
 Exploring Rich UI via Sample Code
 Creating your own RUIHandlers and RUIWidgets from scratch
 HelloWorld
 Visual Editor Workshops (learning to use the Rich UI tools)
– Standard mode editing
– Split Screen
– Experimenting with common widget functions
– EGL Rich UI Debug
 Additional Workshop
– Calculator
– Temperature Converter
– Login
63 © 2009 IBM Corporation

–
 In this workshop, you will:
 Create a new Package in your EGL Rich UI Project
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the Package
 Copy/Paste some sample code
 Preview the web application
 Customize some of the EGL Rich UI properties
© 2009 IBM Corporation 64


–
 So now that we’ve got a new project, let’s create our first EGL Rich UI page.
 First we’ll create a package to house this simple application.
 Right-click over EGLSource and select New  EGL Package
 In the wizard that pops up, name the Package: mySamples , and then click Finish
65 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 Now let’s create a RUIHandler in the package. Right-click over the mySamples package and select: New > EGL Rich UI Handler
 Name the EGL source file: sample1
© 2009 IBM Corporation 66


–
 From the slide ***Notes , copy and paste the RUIHandler code for sample1
 From the RBD
Source view: Select all of the boilerplate statements and replace them with the slide notes code.

Save (Ctrl/S)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 67


–
 Select the
Preview mode – click the Button

Return to the
Source mode, and modify some of the EGL code.

Return to
Preview mode to test (to view ) your work
© 2009 IBM Corporation 68

–
 In this workshop, you will:
 Create another new Package in your EGL Rich UI Project
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the Package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Customize some of the RUIHandler properties in EGL
 Preview the web application
© 2009 IBM Corporation 69


–
 Let’s create (from scratch) our first EGL Rich UI page – and learn about the Rich UI
Visual Editor in the process
 First we’ll create another new package:
 Right-click over EGLSource and select New  EGL Package
 In the wizard that pops up, name the package helloworld
, and then click Finish
70 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
–
 Your project should now look as follows:
 Now let’s create a new RUIHandler
 Right-click over the helloworld package and select new EGL Rich UI Handler
71 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
–
 In the wizard that pops up, name the handler Hello, and then click finish
 Hello.egl
should now be opened in the Content Area by the EGL Rich UI Editor
 Let’s take a tour of the Rich UI Editor!
 You should initially be in the editor sub tab of the editor
 This is much like the visual editor used for JSF
72 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Notice the palette on the right side of the editor
 Think of the palette as what you would see in a JSF environment. From the palette we will drag and drop widgets onto our page
 New Concepts:
 The palette is built into the design editor instead of existing as its own eclipse view.
 You may think that the list of widgets in the palette is quite sparse. This is because Rich UI allows you to define your own custom widgets!!
 The Refresh palette button exists so that newly created widgets can appear on the palette and later dragged onto a page.
 Initially, only the RUIWidgets are shown in the palette.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 73


 The concepts behind designing pages with Rich UI are similar to what you would see when designing pages with basic HTML.
 In essence, a designer can still think in terms of laying out HTML tables on a page.
 The fundamental Rich UI widget is a Box .
 A Box is just an HTML Table (a container, used to hold other controls, text and data)
 The first step in creating any type of web page is most often the creation of an HTML table to give the page some structure.
 The first and notably the last step to adding a component onto a page, is through the use of the children or initialUI variable property.
 The above code creates an HTML table, then adds the input field as its child.
 In a Box, all children are given a new column in the HTML table (so, each child will be added to the right of the child before it).
 If you would like children to be added vertically, you will need to tell the box how many columns you would like.
74 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 A RUI Widget is essentially a definition of an HTML tag.
 There exists a RUI Widget for almost every HTML tag (table, h1, h2, etc.).
 However, if a RUI Widget is not available for a particular HTML tag, you can always implement one yourself!
 Now let’s get on with our Hello World page!
 We’ll be placing a TextLabel, TextField, and Button onto the page.
 From the palette drag, a Box onto the page
 Click on the Box and drop it anywhere on the page
 The editor will turn green indicating the location the Box (HTML Table) will be dropped.
75 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 Once you drop the Box onto the page, you will be greeted with a pop-up asking what you would like to name your variable of type Box
 At this juncture, let’s just take the default 
(more on this later)
 You should now see the outline of a Box in the visual editor!
 The next step is to adjust some of the properties for the Box (make sure the Box is selected)
 In the bottom left corner of the IDE, notice the
Properties view
 From there specify
“2” for the columns property
 Press Ctrl/S to save the page.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 76


–
 Now is a good time to re-explain the columns property for the Box
 By telling our Box that we only want it to have 2 columns, we are limiting the table to having only 2 columns. As we put widgets inside of the Box, every 3 rd widget will cause a new row to be created in the Box, and will be inserted into that row.
 Let’s add a TextLabel to the Box
 From the palette, drag a TextLabel widget into the Box
© 2009 IBM Corporation 77


–
 When you have dropped the TextLabel into the Box, name it myFirstTextLabel in the pop-up that greets you.
 The TextLabel should now be placed inside of the Box
 With the label selected in the visual editor, focus on the Properties View and change the text to be “Hello World: ” , then press Enter
78 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 Next, drag a TextField onto the page, and inside of the Box
 Once you’ve dropped the TextField into the Box, name it’s corresponding variable myFirstTextField
79 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 Finally, let’s drag a button onto the page!
 Remember that even though the visual editor may show the green bar as being to the right of the TextField, we specified that the Box has only two columns
 This will cause the button to actually be placed into the first column of a new row
 When asked to give the Button a variable name, simply take the default by clicking
OK
 Your page should now look as follows!
80 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 With the newly created Button selected on the page, turn your attention to the
Properties view .
 Select the Events tab
 Click on the onClick event
 Click Add Event Handler
 Name the function populateTextField
 Next, go back to the
and at the bottom of the view, switch to the
Source View
81 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 You should now see the code for the page
 You should see three variables: a Button, a TextField, a TextLabel, and a Box
 Inside of the function on the page, code the following line of EGL Source
 Remember to use Content Assist!
 More on event handling later!
© 2009 IBM Corporation 82


–
 What did we just do?
 First, we created an event handler that would fire whenever the button was clicked
 Second, inside of this event handler, we set the text property of our input field to a literal string
 We are done with our first web application
 Switch to the Preview tab of the EGL Rich UI Editor
 Notice the page finally running in a real browser
 Click the button and see what happens
83 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Let’s take a look at the code for the HelloWorld page we just created!
 Notice that we are using the columns = 2 property
 This means that every 3 rd child will go on it’s own row in the table
84 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In the code, change the columns property to equal 1
 Now return to the Preview tab of the EGL Rich UI Editor and notice the change in the page when it renders
85 © 2009 IBM Corporation

–
 In this workshop, you will:
 Create another new Package in your EGL Rich UI Project
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the Package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Use the Rich UI Editor in Split-Screen mode
 Use some of the common widget functions ***
 Widget.Fadein()
 Widget.Focus()
 Widget.select()
 Widget.reSize()
 Use the EGL Rich UI Debug facility
 Preview the web application
*** These functions are common to all widgets and widget types
86 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 First, right-click over the EGLSource folder and create a new package
 Name it sandbox
 Next, right click over the sandbox package and create a new
EGL Rich UI Handler
 Name it:
87 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Add a Box and some Widgets to wksp2
 Using the Visual Editor, add the following widgets to wksp2
 box
 Name: boxOuter
 columns: 2
 alignment: CENTER
 backgroundColor: AliceBlue
 width: 400
 height: 300
 Four TextFields
 Named:
TextField1  TextField4
 Add a 2 nd box and a Button inside the box
 Keep all of the defaults for both widgets
88 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Add an Event and an EGL Event-Handling Function
 Using the Visual Editor:
 Select the Button
 From the Events sub-tab
 Click: Add Event Handler
 Name the event: buttonClickEvent
 From the onClick Event
 Open the Function comboBox
 Select: buttonClickEvent
 Switch to EGL Source editing mode
 Using Content Assist ( Ctrl+Spacebar ) add the following code in the buttonClickEvent(…) function:
 Save your code
© 2009 IBM Corporation 89

 Preview the View – Add Some New Functions
 From Preview
 Click the button
 Note that the text is truncated in the widget’s U.I.
(let’s fix this)
 From Source editing mode, add the following additional EGL statements to the RUIHandler:
(again, use Content Assist to create)
 Save, and from Preview, Click the button – note the effects of the new functions
 Experiment with different values for the fadein/fadeout, width and select/focus functions
90 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Debug Rich UI Logic*** (See Slide Notes before beginning this Workshop)
 Recall from your previous EGL learning that to Debug you:
 Set breakpoints at the lines in the EGL source you wish to begin line-byline debugging
 By Double-clicking in the gray border next to an operational line
(not a declaration)
– an executable statement
 You Debug from Project Explorer
So go ahead!
From within wksp.egl
- Set a breakpoint in the buttonClickEvent
From Project Explorer:
- Right-click over wksp2.egl
- Debug EGL Rich UI Application
91 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Debug Rich UI Logic – Test Your Rich UI Logic
Note that Debug will launch your view in the browser
 Enter values in some of the TextFields
 Click the button
(and confirm the Perspective switch)
 Besides viewing the code execution line by line, be sure to explore all of the widget properties and their values.
When finished?
Terminate and close the Debugger.
Then return to the
Rich UI Perspective
92 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Split Screen Mode in the Workbench – 1 of 3*** Slide Notes
One very nice way to understand the “cause and effect” between editing EGL code and using the
Visual Editor to design your Rich UI applications is to work in split screen mode. To do this:
 With wksp2.egl already opened in the EGL Rich UI editor
 From Project Explorer:
 Right-click over wksp2.egl
 Open with EGL Editor
 With both editors open in the Content Area:
 Select the EGL Editor copy of the source
 Left-Click the tab (as shown)
 Hold and drag towards the bottom
 When the folder-pointer becomes a downward-pointer release the mouse

93 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Split Screen Mode in the Workbench – 2 of 3
 So now you can:
 Use the Visual Editor
 Drag & Drop Widgets from the Palette
 Set Properties
 Move with mouse-based development
 And see the new EGL statements and properties in the code
…or you can …
 Develop your Rich UI application from the EGL code-level
 And immediately see the effect of your work in the
Visual Editor
Let’s experiment with this a little (next slide)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 94

 Edit in Split Screen Mode – 3 of 3
 From the Visual Editor, add a new Button to the RUIHandler (take all of the defaults)
 Note the effect in the EGL source code (a new Button variable is added)
 Make some changes to the view by editing the EGL source and note the Visual Editor effect

Preview
 In order to synch-up the source copies in both editors you will have to save changes (on either side of the split-screen)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 95


–
 In this workshop, you will:
 Review Rich UI Events
 Create another new Package in your EGL Rich UI Project
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the Package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Customize some of the RUIHandler properties in EGL
 Add event-handling functions in the RUIHandler that
 Preview the web application and test your work
 Optionally
 Create additional calculator buttons and functions in the RUIHandler for subtraction, multiplication, division, etc.
 Debug your calculator as an EGL Rich UI Application
96 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Create the Calculator’s Package and RUIHandler
 First, right-click over the EGLSource folder and create a new package
 Name it calculator
 Next, right click over the calculator package and create a new
EGL Rich UI Handler
 Name it:
Calc
97 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Let’s switch gears on this workshop, instead of using the visual editor, let’s code our presentation logic using EGL source code editor.
 Once the Calc RUI Handler is opened in the EGL Rich UI Editor, switch to the Source mode
 Now, let’s create an HTML table to lay out our UI Components:
 Code a new Box (like below), and give it the property shown in the screen capture.
Remember to use Content Assist when specifying a type of widget or widget properties!
{ columns = 2 };
 Once the Box is created, add it to the initialUI property of the RUIHandler
 This will ensure that onLoad, the table is rendered in the page.
98 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Add (code) labels and field widgets, then add them to the Box via the children= property
 Once the labels and fields are coded, add them to the Box as children.
 The web application should Preview similar to 
99 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Now that we have our UI Components on the page, we’ll add a Button to trigger an event when the user clicks it, in the browser.
 Create a new Button in the RUIHandler source code below the resultValue variable
 Next add the Button as a child to the Box
 The web application should now preview as follows
 Now let’s add an event listener to the button
© 2009 IBM Corporation 100


 Add a comma after the text property of the calcButton variable.
 Press Ctrl+Spacebar (Content Assist)
 Select the onClick-Button event.
 From there we will give the onClick event a function name: addValues
 Initially you will see an error because the addValues function does not exist.
 Next, code the following function below the calcButton variable (use Content Assist)
 Press Ctrl + Shift + O to bring in the import statement for Event
© 2009 IBM Corporation 101


–
 Note that all of the data in a web application is eventually of type string
 For this reason we must cast the values in the input fields to int before we do math
 Save the RUIHandler and try it out!
 You have now been introduced to coding with Event driven development.
 Reexamine the RUIHandler if you don’t understand what we just did
 For sure production applications will be more complicated than this
 Note that as event listeners as you want can be applied to Widgets
 A widget could have an onClick property as well as onMouseOver and so on…
102 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 If time permits, add three additional buttons to the web application, bound to three functions for:
 Subtraction
 Multiplication
 Division
 You may want to work with other styling elements as you’ve learned in these sections:
 Background color for your Calc widget
 backgroundColor – or just color (which is text color) for your resultValue
 Also, if time permits:
 From the EGL Source Code Editor – add several break-points inside your Calculator functions
 From Project Explorer: Debug your work
103 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 Now that we’ve got a very nice Web 2.0 Calculator, let’s make a login page.
 First right-click over the EGLSource folder and select New  Package
 Name the package authenticate
 Next right-click over the authenticate package and create a new Rich UI Handler.
Name the file: login
104 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Drag a box onto the page from the visual editor
 Just take the default for the variable name.
 Next add the following properties to the box using the visual editor
105 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Now that we’ve got a Box to lay out our components, let’s go ahead and create some components to allow for username and password input!
 Once the following components have been created, modify the Box declaration accordingly!
 Save the page and compare your results to the following 
Now that we have our UI laid out, let’s create some presentation logic that will authenticate a user and switch to the Calc view
(continued on the next slide)
106 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Modify Calc.egl:
 From Calc.egl (the source is in the \calculator\ package:
 Add a box widget variable, named: layoutBox
(columns=2, etc. for properties)
– Also, put all of the current calculator widgets inside of layoutBox’s children=[…] property
 Code the following logic in the RUIHandler
 Note we are giving the RUIHandler two different events to listen for.
 loginFunc (bound to the button) and resetUI (which you will bind to onFocusLost for the Password field)
 Also note that we are creating a variable of type Calc and setting it as the child to our login box
Note that this technique assumes the main box in
 Calc is named: layoutBox
 Remember to press Ctrl + Shift + O to bring in import statements
 Bind the resetUI function to the onFocusLost event for the Password field
 Save the file and Preview the web application (and test your coding)
107 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Additional Simple OPTIONAL Workshop – an Online Temperature Converter
 In this workshop, you will:
 Create another new Package in your EGL Rich UI Project
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the Package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Customize some of the RUIHandler properties in EGL
 Add event-handling functions in the RUIHandler that
 Preview the web application and test your work
 Optionally add a function that converts Celsius to Fahrenheit and revise the U.I. accordingly
© 2009 IBM Corporation 108

 Temperature Converter “High
Level” Steps
 Now that you’ve created a number of RUIHandlers you should be able to recall the steps to create a new RUIHandler from scratch (if not feel free to scroll back through these slides and revisit them). So perhaps it’s time to see what you can do with only the final objective – instead all the detail click-for-click instructions.

Create a simple Fahrenheit to Celsius conversion web application on your own

Use the
 visual editor - or
 manually code the EGL presentation logic
 Whichever you feel more comfortable with

You could GOOGLE the algebra for the tempconversion, but we’ll be generous, and give that to you 
109 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 If time permits, you can upgrade the Converter to convert both from Fahrenheit to Celsius and vice versa.
 Here’s the new formula
 You will need to modify a number of places in the RUIHandler source code.
 You could either work on this yourself, or use the code in the ***Notes section of this slide as a model
110 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
RBD/EGL Development
Units:
 Rich UI Properties and Event Handling
© 2009 IBM Corporation 111


 In this comprehensive workshop, you will:
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the mySamples package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Add several different types of RUIWidgets
 Work with (customize) the essential U.I. Properties and Events for the RUIWidgets
 Using the Visual Editor
 Using EGL source code editing
 Preview the web application – and verify “cause and effect”
 Note – this is simply a learn by trial-and-error workshop, that asks that you experiment with different widget properties and events.
 Do not try too hard to match the PowerPoint screen captures exactly.
 And feel free to specify other settings for properties
– just as long as you can tie the eventual (Previewed) result with a specified property value
112 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 RUIWidget Properties – Setting Basic Properties from the Visual Editor
 From your \ mySamples
\ package, create a new RUIHandler named: ruiPropertySample
 Using the Visual Editor, drag in a box – give the box the following properties:
 name: Box
 Alignment: CENTER
 Columns: 2
 Color: Gray
 BackgroundColor: Wheat
 Font: Verdana
 fontSize: 10pt
 fontWeight: bold
 Using the Visual Editor, drag a TextLabel into the Box
 Name: TextLabel
 Preview 
 Note the colors, alignment, font styling, etc.
113 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 From the Properties view, modify the following for Box
 name: Box – Note you can not change the name from the Properties view
 Alignment: LEFT
 Columns: 2
 Color: Moccasin
 BackgroundColor: SteelBlue
 Font: Courier
 fontSize: 14pt
 fontWeight: normal
 Preview
 Customize the individual properties for the TextLabel 

Preview

 Note that the individual RUIWidget’s properties over-ride the Box
(container widget) properties, when both are set for the same attribute
© 2009 IBM Corporation 114


 From Properties, modify the Border values for Box 
 borderColor: GoldenRod
 borderStyle: groove
 borderWidth: 8
 Preview
 Customize the individual Border properties for the TextLabel 
 Preview 
 Try a few different settings for border color and style
 Preview after each customization
© 2009 IBM Corporation 115


 Using the Visual Editor, drag in three additional
TextLabels
 Be sure to add them inside of the Box

 Preview (with Padding: 8 for the Box)
 From Properties, set the Box’s Padding to
 22
 Preview
 2
 Preview
 Set one of the TextLabel’s padding to: 22
 Preview 
TextLabel with padding: 22

Padding adds space between the container
(parent) component and its children
116 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 RUIWidget Properties –
Set Position Properties
 From Properties , select another TextLabel , and set these Properties 
 backgroundColor: Gray
 Position:
 relative
 X: 22
 Y: 33

Width: 255
 Height: 44
 Preview

Change the same
TextLabel’s position to absolute

Select, hold and drag the
TextLabel inside the Box
 Drag the TextLabel anywhere, the x/y will change accordingly
 Preview … and press the Refresh button
© 2009 IBM Corporation 117

Relative positioning moves an element RELATIVE to its original position.
If you set x to -3 with relative positioning, the object moves 3 pixels to the left of where it would normally appear.
With absolute positioning, an element can be placed anywhere on a page by setting its x and y properties.


 From Properties, select the TextLabel with the absolute position – and set the following
Properties:
 Position:
 X: 8
 Y: 8
 Appearance
 Opacity: .6
 Cursor: hand
TextLabel with hidden property
 Opacity is a float ranged between 0 (zero, opaque) and 1.0 (one, completely transparent).

Select another TextLabel, and from Appearance, specify:
 Visibility: hidden
 Select another TextLabel, and from Appearance specify:
 Cursor: wait
 Preview 
Note: 3D – effect with transparent (opaque) TextLabel in the foreground http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-color/#transparency
Note also the hidden property … working 
118 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
RBD/EGL Development
Units:
 Cascading Style Sheets and Rich UI
© 2009 IBM Corporation 119


 It’s an axiom of the web development world that, CSS is very important in professional layout, consistency, and many aspects of U.I. So it should come as no surprise that the same is true for Rich UI and Web 2.0 development.
 In recent years, free flow web designs have become the standard for all web pages. This means that HTML tables are no longer used for base UI layout. Instead, floating Divs are the preferred method.
 These floating Divs are simply containers. Containers that are styled by
CSS tags and classes.
 By designing a web page with floating Divs and CSS, you end up getting a very flexible design. The entire look and feel of the web page can be changed by simply editing the CSS file, and never touching a single line of
HTML.
 This one of the benefits of using CSS over HTML tables.
120 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Since this is a Rich UI specific course, we can’t teach the intricacies of – or deep-dive into CSS. We can however give quick overview – and teach you “about” CSS.
 To start off, there are two types of CSS groupings: classes and IDs
 A class can be referenced as many times as you want inside of an HTML file.
 An id, on the other hand, can only be referenced once – as it is also used by JavaScript as the unique identifier for the Rich UI element it is assigned to
(and can be returned by calling: document.getElementById(“…”) in native JavaScript
 The two also have a slightly different syntax…see below
 Note the differences in syntax between IDs and classes:
.
<cssClassName>
…instead of…
#
<cssClassName>
121 © 2009 IBM Corporation


Lets now step into a simple but quick workshop that will demonstrate some of what you can do with CSS.
 Create a new package under the EGLRichUI project called css .
 Next, create a new Rich UI Handler called CSSDemo
 Often pages are constructed with the following general layout and structure
 Container
 Header

Navigation
 Content
 CSS is then used to position and style these elements
 Each of the above elements are divs. Note that the content div may contain many more divs inside of it.
122 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Copy/Paste the following code in the notes, and replace the boiler plate code with it.
 Note that we have created a standard layout using Divs.
 A container has been created to hold all of the free form Divs.
 Inside of it is a header div, a nav div, and a content div.
 The content div in itself then contains several other divs
 Also note that we chose to use the CSS “id” property for things that would only appear on the page once, and “class” property for things that could appear on the page multiple times!
123 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Now that we have created a simple layout using HTML (or in our case Rich
UI), lets add the CSS to style it.
 Copy/paste the code in the notes section of the slide and append it to the
EGLRichUI.css
file – which is under
\WebContent\ in your EGLRichUI project
 Note the use of two properties:
 Position: relative
 Float: left
 These are the key properties for designing free flow web pages
 Study the code, edit it, and examine the changes, then go to the following
URL to learn more about CSS topics:
 http://www.w3schools.com/css/
© 2009 IBM Corporation 124

 RUIWidget Properties – .CSS Classes –
1 of 3
 As you’ve seen, U.I. characteristics can be set manually – and explicitly and directly for each RUIWidget (and RUIWidget elements)
 However, it’s likely that the look & feel of your application will be controlled by the entries in your .CSS (Cascading Style
Sheet)
 Your Rich UI project will have a Cascading
Style (or more than one, it depends on your shop web standards) in the
\WebContent\css\ directory.
 This file has to be in the \WebContent\ directory, but not necessarily under \css\ that’s your call

A .css file contains two entities:
 classes – which begin with a period
 See
.outputTextSmallBoldRed
 ids – which begin with a pound sign

See
© 2009 IBM Corporation
.boxStyle
The format of a .css class is as follows:
• Period (or dot)
• Unique className (unique within the file)
• Open curly brace
• A set of HTML properties as value pairs – ending with a semi-colon
• A closing curly brace
• A closing semi-colon
In order for your RUIHandler to use the classes and ids within a .CSS file, you will add a property to the handler statement as follows: cssFile= “folder/CSSFileName.css”
125
And you will reference the specific .CSS class in the class property of your widget


 From Project Explorer, open your project’s
.css file and add a new class as shown
 Note that Content Assist (Ctrl+Spacebar) can be used to help you build the entries shown here
 Save the file and your changes
 From the Visual Editor – with ruiPropertySample in the Content Area:
 Select the outer Box (simply named “Box”) and from Properties, erase the font property
 Select one ore more of the TextLabels , and specify a class property as follows:
Add the following .css class to your project’s .css file:
.
outputTextSmallBoldRed
{ font: Verdana ; font-size: 12pt ; color: red ; font-weight: bold ;
};
 Note that .css class names are cAsE SenSItivE
© 2009 IBM Corporation 126


 From the EGL Editor (in Source mode)
 In the handler statement, notice the property just after the open curly brace: cssFile = "css/EGLRichUI.css"
 Preview 
 Hierarchy of Style Elements
The run-time view will reflect your styling design elements as follows:
127
Individual
RUIHandler
Properties
.css Classes and IDs
HTML element defaults
Order
Of
Precedence
© 2009 IBM Corporation


This is a simple, copy/paste RUIHandler that allows you to see how to use:
 Box Alignment
 Box Padding
 Dynamic Widget declarations (using new – inside the code)
 Steps:
 From the mySamples package, create a new RUIHandler named: Alignment
 From the Slide ***Notes
 Copy all of the code
 Completely replace the existing
RUIHandler boilerplate statements
 Save
 Preview 
 Study the coding solution, and note cause & effect
128 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 EGL Rich UI utilizes what is called event driven development. Much of the run-time behavior is based on user-directed events that occur on a web page. Some of these events include:
 onClick
 onChange

 onKeyDown
 onKeyUp

 onFocusGained
 onFocusLost
 onMouseMove
 Every widget or “thing” on a web page can have events tied to it.
 At run-time (in the browser), widgets listen for specific user-events, which can trigger calls to your EGL functions. You code “responses” to these events inside the functions:
 Data validation
 Data access
 Etc.

Understanding the event driven development model is important
– and it’s possibly quite different from the kind of software programming you have done before. We’ll dedicate a few extra slides to it…okay?
© 2009 IBM Corporation 129


 RUIwidgets (buttons, listboxes, textfields, etc.) respond to events that are:
 Event-Driven – They happen when they happen arbitrarily not as a result of:
 Sequence, Selection and Repetition
 Preemptive – events can (and will) fire off calls to EGL functions when they occur – concurrently, but not “multi-threaded”
 Terms and Concepts – Deep Dive
 An event is:
 An external occurrence of some user action in the browser (like a user mouse-click, or button-click, or ListBox selection, or mouseover (“hover-help”), etc.
 A non-visual occurrence of something like a return from a Service call or return from a call to an external JavaScript or some other RUIWidget
 The EGL Functions that respond to events are called: event handlers
 Events require an event dispatcher to call your EGL event handlers (Functions)
 In the Rich UI world, the event dispatcher is provided by the framework and system code
(i.e. you don’t write such things – at least not in EGL)
 Your development (EGL Rich UI logic) will thus largely consist of:
 Coding EGL statements inside of functions that respond to the various external and nonvisual events you wish to handle, so that the event dispatcher will know which ones to call:
 There are essentially two types of EGL Functions:
 Initial U.I. presentation or “set-up code” – that is executed before the application
 A collection of EGL functions that respond to visual and non-visual events
130 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Concepts – Browser Events and Actions
 In Rich UI, browser events are generated based on user input:
 Mouse clicks, mouse movement, mouse button release
 Key presses, Key releases
 Etc.
 Each widget gets to define what constitutes an event for it, and which EGL Function will be associated with it:
 button.onClick
 listControl.onChange
 Any given widget may allow multiple kinds of EGL Functions to be associated with its events:
 inputText.onKeyUp
 inputText.onFocusLost
 inputText.onChange
 Example – in this Grid control, when the user “clicks” a row, the values in that row are loaded into the detail Widget above it in the browser.
 Conversely
– if the user modifies a value and clicks the Update button?
The corresponding value in the Grid control is modified.
131 © 2009 IBM Corporation

RUI Programming Functionality
Event-Driven Programming Model
 The event dispatcher (Remember?
You don’t code this) calls your EGL
Function when the appropriate combination of user inputs occurs at run-time.

This is based on your development specifications, which include:
 A defined event handler
 The EGL function code in your
RUIWidget / RUIHandler
 Besides calling your eventhandling EGL code, the event dispatcher also passes an event argument to your code:
(e event in ) 
 The argument contains details about the event which you can use programmatically to solve dynamic
U.I. requirements such as:
 Drag & Drop
 Determining which button was clicked, etc.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 132

Do processing
…
Call a service 
Wait …
Wait …
Wait …
Wait …
Service call returns! 
…
Do more processing
…
Traditional Run-time model
(Next Sequential Instruction programming idiom)
Do processing
…
Call a service 
(Specify a “Callback” Function)
…
Do more processing
…
Service call returns! 
(“Callback” Function is automatically invoked)
…
Do more processing
…
Rich UI Run-time model
(Modular, independent functions)
133 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Do InitialProcessing
Render RUI artifacts in browser
Event
- onClick captured in
RUIHandler, handled as an EGL Function
Call a service (note that calling a service does NOT pre-req. a browser/user event)
Events in the
Browser
User clicks a button

Control immediately returns to the browser
Database
Enterprise Data
© 2009 IBM Corporation
Event Service call returns
(EGL “Callback” Function automatically invoked)
Event
Pipeline RUI Handler (EGL) code
134


So now, let’s do some work with events and RUIWidgets. From the Palette, add two TextFields, a Button and another TextLabel into the Box

(Review/Practice) Customize some of the properties. Don’t try to replicate the screen capture exactly, just be sure you understand cause & effect for the properties when you Preview
 Some Properties you might want to experiment with include:
 Color
 BackgroundColor
 Width
 Font
 FontSize
 FontWeight
 Opacity
 Border:
 Color
 Style
 Preview 
135 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 onFocusLost happens when a user tabs or clicks out of a field
 onFocusGained happens when a user tabs or clicks into a field
 To understand how this works:
 Add the following two functions to your
RUIHandler’s source code 
 Save your code

From the Design view:
 Select TextField1 , and from Properties/Events:
 open the onFocusLost Function combo-box
 select focusLostFunc
 Select TextField2, and from Properties/Events:
 open the onFocusGained Function combo-box
 select focusGainedFunc
 Preview
 Type a value into TextField1 and hit the Tab key on your PC so that the FocusLost and FocusGained events fire off.
You can also type into TextField1 and mouse-click into TextField2
© 2009 IBM Corporation 136


 So – you probably noticed that when you tabbed out of TextField1 (at Preview time) the box
“tightened up” (resized itself) proportionately to the # of characters of content in your TextField.

My bet? This is not a behavior you want
– at least not a default.
 To make the boxes fixed-width - from the Design view:
 Select each of the TextFields (one at a time), and from Properties/Position
 Specify a fixed-width:
 Preview
© 2009 IBM Corporation 137


 onClick happens when a user clicks a Widget with their mouse – typically a button, radio-button, check-box, etc.
 To see how this works:
 Add the following new function  to your RUIHandler’s source code:
 Save your code
 From the Design view:
 Select the Button, and from Properties/Events,
 open the onClick Function combo-box
 select buttonClickedFunc
 Preview
 Click the Submit Button
 Check out the text value of TextLabel2
© 2009 IBM Corporation 138


 onMouseOver happens when a user hovers their mouse over a widget. This is typically used for:
 Context-sensitive (hover) help
 Rolling images over – i.e. making the images bigger, etc.
 onMouseOut happens when a previously hovering mouse over a widget leaves the widget’s area
 To see how this works:
 Add the following new functions to your
RUIHandler’s source code:
 Save your code
 From the Design view:
 Select one of the TextLabels, and from
Properties/Events,
Select onMouseOut and
…onMouseOver functions
 Preview
 Hover your mouse over the TextLabel … … then move your mouse away from the TextLabel
© 2009 IBM Corporation 139


 onContextMenu happens when a user RIGHT-clicks over a Widget with their mouse
 To see how this works:
 Add the following new function to your
RUIHandler’s source code:
 Save your code
 From the Design view:
 Select TextField1, and from Properties/Events,
- open the onContextMenu Function combo-box
- select onContextMenuFunc
 Preview
 First
Left-click over TextField1 (nothing, correct?)
 Then
Right-click over TextField1
© 2009 IBM Corporation 140


 There is much more on Event Handling we’ll cover later in this section. For now, it is enough to understand that:
 All of the events you just specified through the Visual Editor tooling may be specified in EGL
 There are other events you have access to – available as:
 Properties of the widgets
 Properties of the Event Record (which is passed in to each function as an input parameter)
 To see how this works:
 Modify the buttonClickedFunc()
……… as shown here 
 Add the following new function to your
RUIHandler’s source code 
 Save your code
 Preview and click the button. Note the effect of the U.I. programming techniques on: TextField2 (selection, setting focus, dynamic width), and on the Button
 From the
Help system, search on: fadein
141 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 The onKeyxxx events happen as a user types into a control (typically an input field). These events are commonly used for:
 Trapping (determining) which key was pressed – and subsequently doing something meaningful based on this
 Doing Letter-by-Letter data entry processing
– example: firing off database access reads as each letter of some code is typed in to the browser)
 To see how this works:
 Add the following new function to your
RUIHandler’s source code 
 Note – these two functions are in the
***Notes section of this slide
 Save your code
 From the Design view:
 Select TextField1, and from
Properties/Events,
Select onKeyUp and
…onKeyUpFunc
 Select TextField2, and from
Properties/Events,
Select onKeyDown and
…onKeyDownFunc
 Preview
 Type values into TextField1
 Press a function key over/into TextField2
© 2009 IBM Corporation 142

–
 In this workshop, you will:
 Create another new Package in your EGL Rich UI Project
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the Package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Customize some of the RUIHandler properties in EGL
 Add event-handling functions in the RUIHandler that
 Preview the web application and test your work
 Optionally add additional calculator buttons and functions in the RUIHandler
© 2009 IBM Corporation 143


onChange onClick onFocusGained onFocusLost onChange occurs when the user changes a widget and moves the on-screen focus from that widget, even if the user has reversed the change.
onClick occurs when the user clicks on the widget. onFocusGained occurs when the widget gains the focus.
onFocusLost occurs when the widget loses the focus. The equivalent event in JavaScript is onBlur onKeyDown onKeyUp onKeyPress onMouseDown
On many browsers, the event occurs repeatedly for as long as the user is pressing the key. Each occurrence of onKeyDown is followed by an occurrence of onKeyPress.
onMouseDown occurs when the user presses any mouse button.
onMouseMove onMouseOver onMouseIn onSelect onMouseMove occurs repeatedly when the user moves the mouse while the on-screen cursor is within the boundary of the widget.
onMouseOver is an event that JavaScript could have named onMouseIn. The event occurs when the user moves the mouse, just as the on-screen cursor moves into the widget. You can use this event, for example, to change the cursor symbol for a particular part of the page.
The event occurs when the user moves the mouse, just as the on-screen cursor moves into the widget. You can use this event, for example, to change the cursor symbol for a particular part of the page.
onSelect occurs when text is selected in a textArea or textField widget.
onMouseUp onMouseUp occurs when the user (having pressed a mouse button) releases it.
144 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Rich UI Widgets – Deep Dive
Units:
 Rich UI Programming Widget Workshops
 Text Widgets
 Selection Widgets

Container Widgets
 HTML Widgets
 IBM-Supplied Widgets

Dojo Widgets
145 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Rich UI Widgets
 There are a number of EGL Widgets supplied by:
 IBM
 3 rd Party Vendors (i.e. Dojo Widgets)
 You (Custom Widgets)
 In this section, we’ll deep-dive on all of the EGL widgets in the
Palette:
 Their essential properties – beyond the properties we’ve just finished studying
 Standard (common) events – ditto
 We’ll categorize the widgets into:
 EGL Widgets:
 Text Widgets
 Selection Widgets
 Container Widgets
 Miscellaneous EGL Widgets
 HTML Widgets
 Other IBM-supplied Widgets
 Dojo Widgets
 For each group we’ll:
 Create a custom RUIHandler
 Work with the properties and events
146 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Rich UI Widgets
Units:
 Text Widgets

Selection Widgets
 Container Widgets and View Layout
 HTML Widgets
 IBM Widgets
147 © 2009 IBM Corporation

–
 In this workshop, you will:
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the mySamples package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Add several different types of Rich UI Text Widgets:
 TextLabel
 TextField
 TextArea
 PassWordTextFeld
 Work with (customize) the essential U.I. Properties and Events for the RUIWidgets
 Using the Visual Editor
 Using EGL source code editing
 Preview the web application – and verify “cause and effect”
 Note – this is simply a learn by trial-and-error workshop, that asks that you experiment with different widget properties and events.
 Do not try too hard to match the PowerPoint screen captures exactly.
 And feel free to specify (experiment with) other settings for properties
– just as long as:
 You can tie the eventual (Previewed) result with a specified property value
 Time permits
148 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Rich UI Text Widgets
 The text widgets are used for input/output text values. There are four of them:
 TextLabel – output (read-only) text
 TextField – input or input/output text
 TextArea – input or input/output text in a scroll-able box (area)
 PassWordTextField
– input text displaying asterisks for security
 Workshop:
 Create a new RUIHandler in: \mySamples\ - named: textFields
 Add a 1-column Box
 Into (inside) the Box , add the following EGL Widgets

 TextLabel
 TextField
 TextArea
 PassWordTextField
 Take all of the defaults for Properties for the Widget names
 Add Text to match the Widget names
 Preview
149 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Add the following common TextLabel tags to a new class in EGLRichUI.css:
 font-family: Verdana ;
 font-size: 10pt;
 color: red;
 font-weight: bold;
 text-align: right;
 width: 123;
 Assign this .css class to the TextLabel
 Add the following line to the textFields handler statement for cssFile :
 Preview:
 Feel free to experiment with other properties and/or events that you’ve already learned about:
 Border
 BackGroundColor, etc.
150 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Add the following common TextField tags to new classes in EGLRichUI.css:
 Code for the .css entries is in the ***Notes section of this slide

Add the following function to your RUIHandler
 Assign this .css class to the TextField:

Bind the validateText function to the onFocusLost event:
 Preview
 Type values in the field
 Tab – or click out of the field
 Note the U.I. behavior
 Feel free to experiment with other properties and/or events that you’ve already learned:
 Border
 Font
 Color
 BackGroundColor, etc.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 151


 Add the following common TextArea tags to a new class in
EGLRichUI.css:
 Add the following function to your RUIHandler
 Add the following assignment statement to your RUIHandler’s initialization() function
 Assign this .css class to the TextArea:
 Bind the processTextArea function to the onFocusLost event:

Preview
 Type values in the TextArea
 Tab – or click out of the field
 Note the U.I. behavior
 Feel free to experiment with other properties and/or events that you’ve already learned
© 2009 IBM Corporation 152


 Add the following two new variables, and modify your RUIHandler’s initialization() function
 Use Content Assist!
 Add the following function to your RUIHandler
 Code is in the slide ***Notes

Bind the validatePassWord function to the onFocusLost event:
 Preview and test both the login functionality and tooltip (mouse-over). There is one bug you might want to clean up (can you find it? It’s a U.I. bug) and you might want to add a button that fires off the validatePassWord function, rather than having it occur onFocusLost
© 2009 IBM Corporation 153


 EGL Rich UI allows you accessibility to the entire HTML syntax range, for input text fields
(actually for all HTML tags) through the setAttribute(xxx,yyy) function.

You could use this to do things like:
 Dynamically modify TextField UI characteristics
 Add in any currently un-supported tooling features, such as:
 maxLength
 Learn more about HTML input attributes: http://www.htmlcodetutorial.com/forms/_INPUT.html
 Workshop:
 Add the following code to textFields :

Preview
 Try to type in more than three characters in the txtFld TextField in the view
© 2009 IBM Corporation 154

Course
Rich UI Widgets
Units:
 Text Widgets

Selection Widgets
 Container Widgets and View Layout
 HTML Widgets
 IBM Widgets
155 © 2009 IBM Corporation

–
 In this workshop, you will:
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the mySamples package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Add several different types of Rich UI Text Widgets:
 Checkbox & CheckBox Group
 ComboBox
 Single-selection List box
 Multiple-selection List box
 Work with (customize) the essential U.I. Properties and Events for the RUIWidgets
 Using the Visual Editor
 Using EGL source code editing
 Preview the web application – and verify “cause and effect”
 Note – this is simply a learn by trial-and-error workshop, that asks that you experiment with different widget properties and events.
 Do not try too hard to match the PowerPoint screen captures exactly.
 And feel free to specify (experiment with) other settings for properties
– just as long as:
 You can tie the eventual (Previewed) result with a specified property value
 Time permits
156 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Rich UI Selection Widgets
 The text widgets are used for input/output text values.
There are five of them:
 CheckBox – For single or multiple selection (true/false) values
 Combo – For single-selection values in a drop-down list
 List – For zero  one selected value in a scroll-able list
 ListMulti – For zero  many selected values in a scroll-able list
 RadioGroup – For mutually-exclusive value selection
 Workshop:
 Create a new RUIHandler in: \mySamples\ - named: selectionWidgets
 Add a 1-column Box
 Into (inside) the Box , add the following EGL Widgets:
 CheckBox
 Combo
 List
 ListMulti
 RadioGroup
 TextLabel
 Take all of the defaults for Properties - and for the Widget names
 Preview
© 2009 IBM Corporation 157


 Add the following function to your RUIHandler

Bind checkBoxFunction to the onClick event:

Preview and test by clicking the checkbox
 Optional workshops for checkboxes:
 Customize the CheckBox text
 Customize the TextLabel’s properties
 Create a “Check Box Group” – inside a new box
158 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 What if you wanted to hide a particular CheckBox within a group, programmatically?
 Answer:
 In the RUIHandler, set the CheckBox’s visibility attribute to “hidden”
 What if I want a CheckBox Group, but do not know at run-time, how many CheckBoxes will be in it?
 Answer – there are two solutions:
1. Dynamic Widget run-time creation using the new widget syntax
2. Create an array of CheckBoxes

Add this function to your RUIHandler code:
 Preview

Question: why are the CheckBoxes vertically oriented? How would you make the check box group orient horizontally?
 Hint – put cbArray into its own box without a columns= property
© 2009 IBM Corporation 159

 ComboBox Widgets – Common Properties and Events
 Most of the time, you will want to load and manipulate comboBoxes programmatically.

To load comboBoxes you will:
 Create and load a dynamic array of strings (most likely through a service call) 
 Calling a service will be covered later in the course
 Invoke this function from your RUIHandler’s initialization() routine
 To pre-select a specific row in the comboBox, you will use the widget.selection=“n” property
 To test which comboBox value was selected, by the user, you will code conditional logic against the widget.selection
property 

Use the modified RUIHandler code shown here in your RUIHandler (Most of this code is in the slide ***Notes )
 Add the following function to your RUIHandle
 Bind comboBoxFunction to the onChange event:

Preview and test by selecting a comboBox value
Optional
– The above case statement assumes there are 4 (or less) values in the array.
Change the logic to be able to associate the comboBox selection, with the array entry.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 160

 ListBox Widgets – Common Properties and
Events
Single-selection listboxes are very much like comboBoxes

To load listBoxes you will:
 Create and load a dynamic array of strings (most likely through a service call) 
 Invoke this function from your RUIHandler’s initialization() routine
 To pre-select a specific row in the listBox, you will use the widget.selection=“n” property
 To test which listBox value was selected, by the user, you will code conditional logic against the widget.selection
property 

Use the modified RUIHandler code shown here in your RUIHandler (Most of this code is in the slide ***Notes )
 Add the following function to your RUIHandler 
 Bind listBoxFunction to the onClick event:

Preview and test by selecting (clicking) a listBox value
Optional
– The above case statement assumes there are 4 (or less) values in the array.
Change the logic to be able to associate the listBox selection, with the array entry.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 161

 RadioButton Widgets – Common
Properties and Events
 RadioButtons are similar to the comboboxes and listbox Widgets

As you did in the past few workshop steps:
 Modify the initialization() function to:
 Load the RadioButton Group dynamically
 Pre-select a specific radio-button (note that in the case of a radio-button, widget.selected
must be assigned the plain-text value to be selected)
 Add the loadRadioButtons() function code 
 (two new functions)
(In the Slide
***Notes
)
 Bind RadioGroupFunction to the onClick event

Preview and test by clicking a radioGroup button
© 2009 IBM Corporation 162

 ListBox Multiple Select Widgets
– Common Properties and Events –
1 of 2
 ListMulti Widgets are similar to single-select list boxes, except that users can – by pressing the Ctrl or Shift keys + clicking, select multiple rows in the box at runtime.
 There’s no difference in loading and initializing
ListMulti and single-select list widgets. However, in processing the selection, you will need to bind the widget’s selection property to an array as the user may select: 0, 1 or many rows
 As you did in the past few workshop steps:
 Modify the initialization() function to:
 Load the ListMulti Widget dynamically
 Pre-select a specific ListMulti values (note that in the case of a ListBox multiple, widget.selection
must be assigned to an integer array, valued with the rows to be pre-selected)
 Add the loadListMulti() function code (two new functions (In the Slide ***Notes )
© 2009 IBM Corporation 163

 ListBox Multi Widgets – 2 of 2 – Also name/value pairs in Selection Components
 Add a Button to the RUIHandler (at the bottom of the box)
Add the new Button here
 Assign the Button’s onClick event to: ListMultiFunction
 Preview :
 Note the pre-selected rows in the ListBox Multi widget
 Select a few other rows, and press the Button
 See Slide ***Notes on manipulating name/value pairs in selection components
164 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Rich UI Widgets
Units:
 Text Widgets

Selection Widgets
 Container Widgets and View Layout
 HTML Widgets
 IBM Widgets
165 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 You will need strong Rich UI design skills, using container widgets (Box and Div widgets) in order to realize a complex design with EGL Rich UI
 This section aims at providing you with enough guided practice for you to use Box and Div widgets to realize any complex U.I. design
 We will start with the Box widget – as this is an IBM/EGL-supplied widget, with a lower-barrier to entry in using and learning
 In order to understand how to use Boxes, you will also need to learn about the concepts of:
 Container controls
 Children properties
…All of which are based on the notion of a document model – that forms the underlying generated-JavaScript source
166 © 2009 IBM Corporation


– initialUI, children, Document Model and Box Widget
 Either following your instructor’s discussion, or on your own (reading) please be sure you understand the materials on the following slides, before continuing with the workshops:
 InitialUI, Children and relationships among container and children widgets
– essentially, the EGL Rich UI language elements that render your widgets according to your design and coding specifications
 The Document “model” of an EGL Rich UI Application’s visual layout
 Rich UI “Boxes” – Container widgets you will use to organize the visual elements in your web application
167 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 So far we have been introduced to a few simple EGL Rich UI concepts.
 Others we have seen in passing, but have not looked at in-depth - In particular, the initialUI and children properties, which are very important
Rich UI language features
 initialUI – A list (in EGL, an array) of things*** to be rendered on the page during it’s initial load.
 initialUI is a property that can only be specified at the RUIHandler level
 This property can only be specified in the declaration of the RUIHandler
 children – A list (another array) of things*** to be rendered and attached to their respective parents
 Most Widgets will obtain the ability to have children

A Box for example can have children. As children are added to a box, they are rendered as new table columns or rows .
 The children property can be changed at run time. Any changes will be simultaneously reflected on the page.
 Note that, using initialUI and children we can create the kinds of hierarchically nested visual control-sets that effectively render data graphically in the browser – in a sort of “inverted tree” structure
© 2009 IBM Corporation 168


 At it’s most basic, the elements of a web page are structured like an inverted tree
 The page itself is considered a web document* **
 All subsequent widgets are added to the document – in the parent/child dependent relationship shown below. Each widget itself can have child widgets added to it
 Below is an illustration of a sample treebased document. Note that the lower “branches” of the tree are widgets that are:
 Related …and… Document
 Dependent
DIV
Table
TR (Row)
© 2009 IBM Corporation
TD (Column) TD (Column) TD (Column) TD (Column)
DIV Table Input Field
169
Literal Text

 InitialUI and Children and Container/Widget Relationships – Code View
 Let’s take a look at the HelloWorld page we just created and see if we can find initialUI and children .
 Both the children and initialUI properties are arrays ( hence the [ … ] )
 Implying that both of these properties may contain more than one RUIWidget
 If you declare multiple children/initialUI RUIwidgets, separate their names with a comma (see above)
 The handler contains an initialUI property which contains the Box we created
 This means that the Box will be initially shown on the page
 The Box itself contains the other widgets on our page (TextField, TextLabel, Button)
 If the Box is displayed on the page, it will of course contain its children
170 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Note the following:
 initalUI is a box
 No border/No color
 1 “column”
 Three “controls”:
– isModal Checkbox
– Text TextLabel
– Button – with an onClick event that fires off:
 OKDialog
– A RUIWidget
– Positioned (x/y) in the browser
– Defined elsewhere in the project
– Contains a child RUIWidget named: “content”
171 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In web design, there are two fundamental HTML tags for laying out pages.
 Div
 Table
 We’ll start with the Table , which is more prominent in business applications with lots of data entry.
 So, how do we utilize HTML Tables from Rich UI?
 Rich UI provides tables as a simple RUIWidget called a Box
 A box can be created like so
Variable Name Variable Type Properties (within curly braces)
 Hopefully by now you are seeing the pattern
 All UI Components ( RUIWidgets ) are declared just like any other EGL Variable
 Ex. myString String;
172 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 A box widget defines a rectangular-container-control that embeds and organizes other widgets.
 You can indicate how many columns are in the box.
 If the number of columns is three, for example, the first three embedded widgets are on the first row in the box, the fourth through sixth are on the second row, and so forth.
 If the number of columns is one, all the embedded widgets are arranged vertically.
 The width of a column equals the width of the largest widget in the column
 You can indicate whether the embedded widgets in a given column are aligned at the column’s center, right, or left.
 Vertical and horizontal scroll bars appear if necessary to give the user access to widgets that scale outside of the browser/screen dimensions
 The following properties are supported for box widgets:
 alignment , which holds an integer value that indicates how the content is aligned in each column:
 0 for left-justify
 1 for center
 2 for right-justify
 children , which holds an array of widgets, as described in Widget properties and functions
 columns , which holds an integer that identifies the number of columns in the box
173 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In this workshop, you will:
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the mySamples package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Add several different types of Rich UI Text Widgets:
 Box
– Different layout options
– Using the Visual Editor to design your layout and doing your work from the EGL source code level
– Using many or most of the box properties
 Div
 Shadow
 Work with (customize) the essential U.I. Properties and Events for the RUIWidgets
 Using the Visual Editor
 Using EGL source code editing
 Preview the web application
– and verify “cause and effect”
 Note – this is simply a learn by trial-and-error workshop, that asks that you experiment with different widget properties and events.
 Do not try too hard to match the PowerPoint screen captures exactly.
 And feel free to specify (experiment with) other settings for properties – just as long as:
 You can tie the eventual (Previewed) result with a specified property value
 Time permits
174 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In this upcoming workshop, you will:
 Deepen skills using the Visual Editor
 Learn more about controlling form layout with RUIWidget boxes
 Embed boxes within boxes, to realize a more complex design
 There will be 3 related workshops:
 boxSample1 – with one set of columns
 boxSample1
– with two sets of columns
 boxSample1 – with additional box layout styling
© 2009 IBM Corporation 175


–
 Before you start working on a web application, you will analyze the U.I. elements in terms of:
 Layout – tables structure, etc.
 Types of components
 Component properties, size, dimensions, etc.
 Design Notes
 Here is boxSample1. From the snapshot note the following:
 Box widget – color, border and Alignment
 Box inside of box
 Aligned TextLabels and TextFields
You will use the RUIWidget boxes to:
• Organize the labels and fields
(treat them as a unit)
• Align the labels and fields
• Provide:
• Dimension
• Background color
• Padding (space between)
TextFields
TextLabels
The Outer Box is used to center the inner
U.I. elements in the browser
Inner Box The inner Box contains the two-column
Label:Field pairs
This is a typical U.I. pattern for an input single-record display, in vertically-aligned, rows/columns
Outer Box
176 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 The Completed Workshop Viewed as an Inverted Tree Through the Outline View
 Note the nesting of the Boxes, labels and fields in the Outline view
 The Outline view documents the inverted tree structure of an EGL Rich UI web application
 You can also select (set focus to) an element by clicking on the element in the Outline view

© 2009 IBM Corporation 177

 Using the Visual Editor - Review
 Like the Outline View, the Visual
Editor shows the outline hierarchy (inverted tree view) of your web application.
Drag & Drop a Palette control ABOVE the top box
 You can drag & drop U.I. elements
 Into the box container controls
 Below or above controls
 Next to controls
Drag & Drop a Palette control inside of
BoxOuter, between BoxNew and BoxMiddle
 Placement ultimately depends on:

 drag & drop
The alignment specification
Drag & Drop a Palette control
Where in the tree you
TextField10 (note that if BoxNew allows two columns the new control will be placed on the next vertical line down)
 The columns specification (for a box)
Drag & Drop a Palette control inside of
BoxRight, between TextLabel7 and TextField6
178 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 boxSample1 – Create the
RUIHandler and Initial Box
 From your \ mySamples \ package, create a new
RUIHandler named: boxSample1
 Using the Visual Editor, drag in a box – give it the following properties:
 name: BoxOuter
 Alignment: CENTER
 Columns: 1
 BackgroundColor: Beige
 borderColor: LightSteelBlue
 borderStyle: groove
 Width: 400
 Height: 300
© 2009 IBM Corporation 179

 boxSample1 – Add a TextLabel and an Inner Box
 From the Palette, add a TextLabel inside
BoxOuter
 Use these attributes

 From the Palette, drag a 2 nd (inner) box into
BoxOuter – placed below the TextLabel
 Name: BoxInner
 Columns: 2
 Alignment: Center
 Width: 300
 Height: 250
 Note –
If you end up mis-spelling any of the
RUIWidget names, you can make corrections in the Source view.
You will have to correct all references to the widget
(the declaration, and any references in the children=[ … ] array)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 180

 boxSample1 – Add a Series of TextLabels and TextFields to the InnerBox
 Using the Visual Editor, drag and drop a series (five each) of
TextLabels and TextFields inside of the InnerBox 
 Do not specify any custom properties
 Preview 
© 2009 IBM Corporation 181

 boxSample1 – Customize the Labels and TextFields with Padding
 Enter Source mode on the RUIHandler.
 Add a colon : suffix and unique number to each TextLabel’s
Text property
 Add padding=4 to the TextLabel properties
 Add padding=2 to the TextField properties

You could of course, have done the above using the Visual Editor. But some things can be done faster in Source mode. With EGL Rich UI – as with most development activities it’s good to learn how to use the best tool for a given job

 Preview 
182 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 boxSample1 – Customize BoxOuter – and Add Another Inner Box
 Return to Design mode
 From Outline view, select: BoxOuter
 Select its Properties tab
 Change BoxOuter’s:
 Width: 600
 Height: 400
 From the Palette, Drag and Drop another Box into BoxOuter (below the TextLabel and above BoxInner )
 Name: BoxMiddle
 Columns: 2
183 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 boxSample1 – Drag BoxInner Inside of BoxMiddle
 Select - hold – drag & drop BoxInner into
BoxMiddle 
 From the Palette, Drag and Drop another Box into BoxMiddle . Below (actually, next to)
BoxInner 
 Name: BoxRight
 Columns: 2
184 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 boxSample1 – Drag BoxInner Inside of BoxMiddle
 As you did before, drag and drop a series (five more each) of TextLabels and TextFields inside of BoxRight 
 Do not specify custom properties
 Preview 
© 2009 IBM Corporation 185

 boxSample1 – Customize the TextLabels, Padding and other Properties
 As you did before, enter Source mode on the RUIHandler.
 Add a colon : suffix and unique number to each of the new TextLabel’s Text property
 Add padding=4 to the TextLabel properties
 Add padding=2 to the TextField properties
 Remove the height and width specification for BoxInner (note that this has the effect of centering BoxInner + BoxRight inside of BoxOuter)
 Preview 
186 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 boxSample1 – Customize BoxOuter (again) – and add yet another Inner Box
 Return to Design mode
 From the Palette, Drag and Drop another Box into BoxOuter (below the TextLabel and above BoxMiddle )
 Name: BoxNew
 From the Palette, add a new TextLabel and a new TextField to BoxNew
187 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 boxSample1 – Add a Submit Button to the Web Application
 From the Palette, Drag & Drop a
Button into BoxOuter (below
BoxMiddle)
 From the Button’s Properties, specify:
 Text: Add New Record
 Preview 
© 2009 IBM Corporation 188

 boxSample1 – Customize U.I. Properties
 From the Properties of the new
TextLabel, specify: 
 text: Search Field:
 paddingRight: 8
 From the Properties of the new
BoxNew, specify:
 paddingTop: 33
 Preview
© 2009 IBM Corporation 189

 boxSample1 – Add a New Event and Bind it to the Button
 With the Button selected - From Events
 Click: Add Event Handler
 Name the Function: onClick
 (Still with the Button selected) from the onClick Event, select the onClick Function
190 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 boxSample1 – Add onClick Code and New TextLabel
 Enter Source mode on the
RUIHandler.
 Add (code) a new TextLabel named: msgField 
 Add msgField to the children array of BoxOuter 
 Add this if statement (you can either code it, or copy/paste from the slide notes)

 Preview 
© 2009 IBM Corporation 191

 boxSample1 – Are We Done?
 Almost 
 With the current design, if your search doesn’t return anything and the msgField.text reminds the users of that, the message is not cleared out upon a subsequent good search.
 Also
– using the Visual Editor tooling, please make the following enhancements to msgField
 Preview 
© 2009 IBM Corporation 192
*** See Notes for code to clear the TextFields and msgField


–
 In this workshop, you will:
 Learn how to realize a standard web application layout, where the boxes contain elements of differing lengths
 Learn how to use field styling to align individual text and field widgets

: When your U.I. elements are of differing sizes, you will not be able to utilize the block boxes as in the previous workshop. Instead, you will need to layout each individual row as a separate box:
 Containing elements
 And vertically-aligned using explicit RUIWidget widths
 See the above snapshot – then turn to the next slide for more analysis
193 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 From the snapshot of the Outline and Design views, note that you will nest individual boxes containing labels and fields within each row of an outer box.
I
N
D
I
V
I
D
U
A
L
B
O
X
E
S
E
A
C
H
F
O
R
R
O
W
© 2009 IBM Corporation
Outer Box
By nesting the individual row boxes, you have complete control over each element’s placement
Because there is no vertical box alignment across disparate boxes, you will need to align the columns via the width attribute
You’ll also have to use a style-attribute to right-justify text, when you can’t align the entire box due to conflicting U.I. alignment requirements (see the Directions and Phone/eMail Address rows above)
194


 From \ mySamples \, create a new RUIHandler, named: customerSearch
 Add a box, named: BoxOuter
 Properties:

Columns: 1
 Font-size: 10 PT
 Add a second box – inside of BoxOuter named BoxSearch
 Add a TextLabel named TextLabelSearch inside of BoxSearch
 Property:

Text: Search Text:

Width: 88
 Add a TextField named: TextFieldSearch next to TextLabelSearch, inside of BoxSearch
 Add an HTML Widget inside of BoxOuter
 Property:

Text: <HR>
 Preview
© 2009 IBM Corporation 195


 Add another box – inside of BoxOuter named BoxRow1
– under the HTML tag
 Properties:
 Columns: 6
 Align: RIGHT
 Inside of BoxRow1 shown below: add the TextLabels and TextFields
 Notes:
 TextLabelCustid and TextLabelLastName width: 88
 TextLabelFirstName width: 111
196 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Add another box – inside of BoxOuter – below BoxRow1 – named BoxRow2
 Property:
 Columns: 4
 Inside of BoxRow2 add the TextLabels and TextFields shown below:
 Notes:
 TextLabelPhone width: 88
 TextLabelMailAddress width: 111
 TextFieldMailAddress width: 288
© 2009 IBM Corporation 197


 Add another box – inside of BoxOuter named BoxRow3
– under BoxRow2
 Properties:
 Columns: 6
 Align: RIGHT
 Inside of BoxRow3 add the TextLabels and TextFields shown below:
 Notes:
 TextLabelCity and TextLabelzip width: 88
 TextLabelState - width: 111
198 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Add another box – inside of BoxOuter – below BoxRow3 – named BoxRow4
 Property:
 Columns: 2
 Inside of BoxRow4 add the TextLabels and TextFields shown below:
 Notes:
 TextLabelDirections - width: 88
 TextFieldDirections - width: 555
© 2009 IBM Corporation 199


 From Source view:
 Change all padding=8  padding=3
 Add the following style tag: to:
 TextLabelDirections
 TextLabeleMail
 TextLabelPhone style = "text-align:right"
© 2009 IBM Corporation 200


 Preview!
© 2009 IBM Corporation 201


–
 Yes – another login page. But this one will allow you to utilize your newly-acquired
EGL Rich UI property and event-handling development skills.
 Also? This is more of an open-ended workshop – meaning that it lacks the detailed click-for-click instructions you’ve gotten used to/dependent on 
 In this workshop, you will:
 Create another new Package in your EGL Rich UI Project
 Create a new RUIHandler inside the Package
 Use the Rich UI Visual Editor to do initial web application layout
 Customize some of the RUIHandler properties in EGL
 Add event-handling functions in the RUIHandler that
 Preview the web application and test your work
 Optionally add:
 Styling elements – to enhance the U.I.
 Event handlers – to provide for immediate feedback to the user
Finished View 
202 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Create a new package under \EGLSource\ named: businessApp
 Inside of the \businessApp\ package, create a new RUIHandler, named: loginPage
 You can style the colors and fonts as you like
 Add the IBM-supplied RUIWidgets as shown below:
 Note the widget types, text properties, their nested placement and relationships, and the widget names (in parenthesis within the Outline view)
 Hints:
 Box1 has columns=1, width = 333, height = 222, borderXXXStyle=groove
 Box2 has columns=2
 The Password field is a
© 2009 IBM Corporation 203


 For the Button, add an onClick event handler to a function named: checkFields
 See the screen capture of this code for some ideas of how to create
 Note that
 There are other import statements (folded)
 The code for this version of the loginPage is in the ***Notes for this slide
© 2009 IBM Corporation 204


–
 As a “warm-up” for the real event-driven programming you’ll be doing later in this course, try the following:
 Add this function inside your RUIHandler:
 Add this eventHandler to the User ID: TextField
 Preview loginPage
 Enter a User ID
 Tab or click out
© 2009 IBM Corporation 205


 There are a number of relatively easy-to-learn and use EGL Widgets left in the Palette that are useful:
 Button
 Hyperlink
 Image
 Note that we will cover HTML and Grid widgets separately
 Workshop:
 Create a new RUIHandler in: \ mySamples
\ - named: miscWidgets
 Add a 1-column Box
 Into (inside) the Box , add the following EGL Widgets:
 Button
 Hyperlink
 Image
 Take all of the defaults for Properties for the Widget names
 Add Text to match the Widget names
 Preview 
 Not very impressive, eh? Let’s jazz this up a little
206 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Button Widgets – Common Properties and
Events
 Add the following common Button tags to
EGLRichUI.css:
 See ***Notes for source
 Assign the .simpleRuiButton class to the Button
 Preview
 Enhance as follows:
 Assign the .
searchButton class to the Button’s class property
 Delete the text entry
 Specify a fixed width and height
 Preview
207 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Specify the following custom properties for the Hyperlink:
 Preview
 And click the hyper-link
 Optionally – change the URL or some of the
Hyperlink references in the EGL source, and re-test
208 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Specify the following custom properties for the Hyperlink:
 Preview
 And mouse-over the image
 Add the following functions to your RUIHandler source:
 Add the following Events to the Image widget:
 Preview
 And mouse-over the image to see the rollover effect
 Optional
(for supreme uber-techies):
 Work with the
Span widget – by adding it in to this RUIHandler, and experimenting with its properties (note, use Content Assist to explore salient properties)
209 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Rich UI Widgets
Units:
 Text Widgets

Selection Widgets
 Container Widgets
 HTML Widgets
 IBM Widgets
210 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
<html>
 You may have existing HTML or HTML “code snippets” you wish to reuse or repurpose” in Rich UI applications. This is very straightforward to do, as follows:
 Create “inline HTML” – where you type the tags directly inside your RUI Widget (or
RUIHandler)
 Create “static” HTML – possibly your existing HTML, or new HTML you create using some dedicated HTML editor (FrontPage, DreamWeaver, etc.)
– then import the HTML into project and include it in your Rich UI page
 The next few workshops will show examples of both
 Where to learn HTML?
 Just about anywhere – but..
 Especially – through free info on the web
 http://www.w3schools.com/html/default.asp
 http://www.html.net/tutorials/html/
 There’s no shortage of books either
 In this section we will cover a few basic HTML tags:
 HR – Horizontal Ruler
 H1 – Heading tag
 Lists – Ordered and unordered
 DIV – a tag used to contain other content
 Table – a tag used to organize content
 Inline Frame
211 © 2009 IBM Corporation
Note – you will not use HTML to create Web Pages
But you may want to use HTML tags to embellish your Rich UI applications – and/or to reuse pre-existing HTML resources.
So – essentially, you will want to know “about” HTML – and how to use HTML – but you won’t have to become an HTML programmer


–
 Workshop:
 Create a new RUIHandler in: \mySamples\ - named: htmlWidgets
 Go immediately into Source view and add the source code in the Slide *** Notes
<HR> tag
<H1> tag
List tags
• Unordered
• Ordered
Div Widget
<Table> tag
<iframe> tag
© 2009 IBM Corporation 212


–
 Preview 
List tags
• Unordered
 Click the Change HTML in EGL button
<H1> tag

List tags
Using GOOGLE or some other search engine, if you don’t know these HTML tags, look-up their definitions on the web
<HR> tag
Div Widget
<Table> tag  The next slide contains a quick study guide to the HTML tags shown here
<iframe> tag
213 © 2009 IBM Corporation


– QuickStart and “Survival Chart”
 Rules of the road:
 Most HTML consists of matching “tags” in the form of:
 <startTag> … content … </endTag>
– Example: <LI> My bulleted list </LI>
 Specific examples from the htmlWidgets view:
 <H1> - a text heading tag – largest font size, default font (there exist <h1>  <h6>, largest to smallest)
 <HR> - creates a horizontal ruler (line) in the web page
 <UL> an “un-ordered” (un-numbered) list that consists of one-to-many:
 <LI> - List (or bulleted list entries)
 <OL> - same as <UL> except creates numbered lists
 <DIV> - a container – consisting of one column and one row (like a one-column Box widget)
 <TABLE> - a complex tag that organizes things like a two-dim table. Consists of:
 <TR> - rows
 <TD> - cells
 <IFRAME> - an inline frame. iFrames allow you to embed another RUIHandler (or another HTML or .JSP page for that matter) inline (inside) of an existing RUIHandler view

Notes - All of the above HTML tags and statements:
 Can be created statically (at design time) or dynamically using EGL RUI statements
 HTML tags have sub-properties, which are fully customize-able
214 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 Make the following modifications to the source:
 Change one of the <H1> to an <H5> tag – and change some of the text
 Change one of the <HR> tags as shown below
 Change some of the text in the OLhtml widget
 Add an extra list:
<li>…your text … </li> tag-set inside the OLhtml widget
 Add a new textarea widget:
 Add this new textArea widget as the final child in the DIV1 widget
 Completely replace the existing tbl widget code with that found in the slide notes
 Make the following changes to the iFrame widget:
 Save – check for syntax errors
 Preview
Note – be sure to use Content Assist (Ctrl/Spacebar) to create new widgets
215 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 Note the cause and effect revisions 
 Blue, right-justified, no-shadow, thick line
 Your changes to the lists and headers
 Note cell color and text-color mods
 New View loaded into the <iframe>
 New TextArea
© 2009 IBM Corporation 216


–
If you have completely static (no need to dynamically build) HTML stream – or streams – it might make sense to organize it as a set of HTML files, dynamically added to your View, but organized in your project as separate files (and not inline). This will allow you to create this
HTML using an intelligent editor (like FrontPage or DreamWeaver).
Try the following:
1. From Project Explorer, create a new Folder under \WebContent\ named: HTML
2. In this folder, create a new HTML file, named: colSpan
 Note – you’ll find HTML files under the Web folder category
3. Replace the boilerplate HTML with the source found in the ***Slide Notes
– at the top (it’s a single line)
4. In your \EGLSource\ folder, create a new EGL package named: utilities
5. In the utilities package, create a new RUIHandler, named: localHTML
6.
Replace the “boiler plate” statements with the code also found in this ***Slide Notes
7. In your HTMLWidgets RUIHandler, add a new widget for local HTML:
8. Add this widget as the bottom (final) child under the DIV1 widget
9. Preview
217 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Rich UI Widgets
Units:
 IBM Widgets
 Grouping
 TabFolder

Simple Menu
 DataGrid
 Tree Control
 Drag & Drop
 Popup Pages

Complex Layout UIs
218 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Grouping Widgets – Common Properties and Events
– 1 of 2
 Grouping Widgets are similar to fieldsets in HTML
 You can look up a fieldset tag online
 Add the following new tag to EGLRichUI.css

 Create a new RUIHandler in: \mySamples\ - named: groupingSample
 Go immediately into Source view and completely replace the boiler-plate source code with the code in the Slide *** Notes
 Preview
 If time permits, follow the steps on the next slide to enhance the View
219 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Select, copy & paste the grouping widget, the box and all of the textlabels and text fields (as shown below) in the source. Make the following modifications
 Change the text= and children= properties
 Change the box widget name – and change its children= identifier(s)
 Modify the TextLabel and TextField widgets (name and text properties)
 Add groupAddr to the children property of box:
 Also add columns=1 as a property of box
 Preview 
 Optional – add a button, that onClick, changes the grouping.Text value
220 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
The Grouping widget actually has a number of additional properties you may want to utilize:

Legend font styling
 Legend block styling

Thicker Grouping borders
 Create a new RUIHandler in \ mySamples \ named: groupingSampleExpanded
 Replace the boiler-plate code in this file with the copy & paste the grouping RUIhandler code in the
Slide ***Notes.
 Preview (see results below)
 Feel free to experiment with different Rich UI properties and events.
221 © 2009 IBM Corporation


Tabs are common widgets for organizing dependent or related business data and functional views
The steps in creating a Tab widget will include:
 Create the RUIHandler
 Add a widget of type tabFolder to your RUIHandler
 Use Content Assist (Ctrl+Spacebar) to allow the tooling to add any imports
 Add the tabFolder inside a box widget
 For each tab, use the tabFolderVar.addTab(“tab heading”,tabContent); API
 Preview
 Let’s check things out…but before we start? We’ll learn how to make RUIWidgets out of RUIHandlers for component reuse
222 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 So – while you’ve been creating RUIHandlers all along, in order to learn the Rich UI editor and the language terms & concepts, in reality (with your production projects), you will be creating more RUIWidgets than
RUIHandlers – as RUIWidgets are the primary component of reuse within RUI technology
 If you’re starting from scratch, it will probably make sense to create:
 A RUIHandler who’s only purpose is to act as a testing container for a single RUIWidget
 The RUIWidget – which you will be able to reuse
… and you’ll work within this process framework, during the final workshops for this course
 But since you’ve got a # of useful widgets already (in the form of existing RUIHandlers) let’s see how to modify them and make them into RUIWidgets:
 Open the file – in Source mode
 Copy and paste the entire RUIHandler statement
 Comment out the original statement
 Modify the following lines:
1. Change: type RUIHandler  type RUIWidget
2. Add a new
Div widget (use content assist) – with a children = property that is the same as the original initialUI = property
3. Change initialUI  to
targetWidget = (reference your new Div widget)
1.
3.
2.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 223


 Following these steps (repeated below for your convenience) – create RUIWidgets out of the following RUIHandlers:
 groupingSample
 htmlWidgets
 miscWidgets
 textFields

Steps:
 Open the file – in Source mode
 Copy and paste the entire RUIHandler statement
 Comment out the original statement
 Modify the following lines:
1. Change: type RUIHandler  type RUIWidget
2. Add a new
Div widget (use content assist) – with a children = property that is the same as the original initialUI = property
3. Change initialUI  to
targetWidget=ui //(reference your new Div widget)
1.
3.
2.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 224


 Workshop:
 Create a new RUIHandler in: \mySamples\ - named: tabSample
 Go immediately into Source view and (using Content Assist) add the source code shown here 
Or…you can pick these source statements from the
Slide ***Notes
 Notes:
 The TabFolder widget is an IBM-supplied custom widget that takes as a parameter a
TabFolderPage. The TabFolderPage widget allows you to define:
– The Tab label (name=)
– The widget loaded in to the tab (widget=)
 The TabFolder also has a number of useful properties for customizing its behavior and UI. We’ll see these in an upcoming workshop
 Save and Preview
© 2009 IBM Corporation 225

 TabFolder Widget Workshop –
Extending the Base Functionality
Click each tab
Ensure that the widgets embedded in the tabFolderPages still work as before
There may be additional functionality you’d want to see in tabFolders in order to handle common dynamic U.I. requirements, such as:
 Pre-selecting a given tab:
 Upon loading the view
 Explicitly (as per the specifications in your business requirements – for example, if each tab represents a step in a work-flow, opening a given tab programmatically, etc.)
 Knowing (programmatically – from within your RUIHandler) what tab a user is on when an event occurs – and taking appropriate business logic action
 Adding graphics to the tab itself
 Changing (customizing) the default style properties
 Explicitly sizing the tab control
 Forwarding (selecting “next tab”) with a button
© 2009 IBM Corporation 226

 Tab Widgets –
Extended Functionality




 Here’s a screen capture of our TabFolder view with a number of the desired techniques implemented:
Show the currentlyselected tab
Graphics in the tabs
Pre-select a tab
Explicit size
 From the slide ***Notes, copy/paste all of the code
 Replace your existing tabSample.egl code with the ***Notes EGL statements
 Preview
 On the next slide we annotate some of the more important language constructs
227 © 2009 IBM Corporation


Read the annotated comments carefully – noting the operational language constructs
 Optional Workshops:
 Pre-select a different tab, upon initial view rendering in the browser
 Add a different graphic – to a different tab
 Add a different Rich UI Widget – to a different tab (suggestion, use a small simple widget)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 228


Standard (rich) Menu Widget
 Most business applications will drive their functionality from a common menu
 Rich UI apps will be no different
 There are several menu widget options available:
 Standard (rich) menu widget – which:
 Is recursive (allowing for multiple levels of sub-menu)
 Allows for embedding different widgets in-line
 Simple menu widget – which:
 Allows for one level of sub-menu
 Is populated from string variables in a dynamic array simple Menu Widget
 In this workshop, you’ll learn how to use the simple menu widget, and how to populate it from dynamic (server-side) data. Steps include:
 Creating a new RUIHandler that:
 Calls a service (in our case, this will be a Library function) to populate the dynamic array of strings
 Assigns the strings to the simple menu widget
 Customize the .css for the menu
229 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Create a new RUIHandler in
\ mySamples
\ named:
SimpleMenuDemo

Using Content Assist, edit the source code, and add the statements shown here


Note the following:
 Call to ServiceLibrary to load the array
 Assignment to a dynamic array of type any
 Defining a custom event listener
 Preview
230 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
 Modify: \WebContent\css\EGLRichUI.css
 Under: .SimpleMenuTitle {
 Add:
– color: white;
 Under: .SimpleMenuItem {
 Add: color: white;
– Background-color: #5a9bd1;
– color: white;
 Modify: SimpleMenuDemo
 Change the case statement shown below
 Preview and try out the techniques
 Optionally add another when clause, to hit your companies web site on-select of some other menu option
231 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Tree Widgets are common and useful components for displaying hierarchical information:
 Menus and links
 Related application data:
 Customers > Orders > OrderItems, etc
 Plain text …or…
 Text + Graphics (icons)
 Rich UI’s Tree widget is composed of:
 Tree Nodes – which contain the text and/or graphics
 Behaviors – which respond to user events
 In our example, we’ll supply event-handlers for: onClick, onMouseOver, onMouseOut
 The steps in creating a Tree widget include:
 Create the RUIHandler
 Add a widget of type Tree to your RUIHandler
 Use Content Assist (Ctrl+Spacebar) to allow the tooling to add any imports
 Add the Tree inside a box widget
 Add code that:
 Loads the Tree dynamically, from an external source
 Responds to user/browser events
– Collapse/Expand a tree category
– Click a node
 Preview
© 2009 IBM Corporation 232


 First create a new package under the EGLSource package named treeControl
 Next right-click over the \ treeControl
\ package and create a new
RUIHandler named:
TreeHandler
 Copy & Paste everything in the
Slide ***Notes over the boiler-plate EGL statements
 Preview
 Note that the values in the tree come from the ServiceLibrary 
 These values would more typically be assigned via calls to back-end services
 But in this case, the Library call will do
(We’ll learn how to call back-end services in an upcoming section)
 Now, let’s break down the code to create a tree widget
233 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In the RUIHandler code for treeControl.egl there are quite a few new EGL Rich UI coding constructs. We have annotated them in the source, but will attempt to amplify our explanations in these slides
Declarations:
Widget variables and properties
Of note the Tree widget:
- Width, Padding
- backgroundColor, behaviors
The event-behaviors consist of:
User click and user mouse-over
(which generates a toolTip
TreeTooltip – a widget that allows
Mouse-over help text
ToolTipResponse is a box widget
Tr TreeValues(0) is a standard EGL
Dynamic array of strings that is
Used to populate the Tree widget
EGL Business Logic:
In this initial function, the code:
Retrieves the values into the dynamic array
Iterates over the array, and creates the initial (highest level – categories) tree nodes
Assigns the treeNodes to the
Tree widget
234 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Here are all of the EGL functions bound to browser/events (except for onClick
– which get’s its own slide)
Declarations:
showTooltip – returns an inline
HTML formatted response to the user’s mouse-over. This function is activated by the Tree widget’s setToolTips property
The click function tests for which browser/user event occurred (that you have handled in this RUI code) – and invokes an EGL function based on the event showFeedback and hideFeedback simply set a background color to a node of a tree, when you mouseover it.
235 © 2009 IBM Corporation


The handleNode
Click function:
 Colors the clicked
TreeNode
 Changes the image (to the clicked
TreeNode)
 Changes the msg.text
 Determines which
TreeNode was clicked – and passes its array index to the expandedNode function
Note:
Read the inline comments very carefully – as they document the Rich UI language features used to implement a Tree Widget’s onClick functionality
The expandNode function:
 Iterates over the dependent array items
 For the clicked
TreeNode – a new set of widgets are dynamically created
 Then the categories are re-built as treenodes and the nodes are assigned to the tree widget
© 2009 IBM Corporation 236


 Along with learning how to design your Views with boxes, you will want to develop a number of
U.I. templates, that act as the framework for your RUIHandler:
 Organization
 Layout
 Static text and graphics – common to most or all web pages
 In this workshop, you will learn one approach to this
– using DIV layouts and custom .css definitions
 Using this sample, you can customize to your specific U.I. templatized requirements
237 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 From Project Explorer:
 Open the com.ibm.egl.education.widgets
project
 Expand \WebContent\ then expand \css\
 Copy floatLayout.css
- and paste it into the \WebContent\css\ package in your
EGLRichUI project
© 2009 IBM Corporation 238


 Inside of the \mySamples\ package, create a new RUIHandler, named: frameSetLayout
 From the Slide ***Notes – copy and paste all of the replacement code
 From the EGL source editor, completely replace all of the boiler-plate code
 Review the code briefly, noting the following elements:
 Reference to the custom .css in the RUIHandler
 The various DIV widgets
 The child widgets inside the DIV widgets Try running the page in an external browser

Save and Preview
 Run in an external browser

Resize the browser
239 © 2009 IBM Corporation


In this workshop, you’ll use the frameSetLayout RUIHandler to contain some of the other widgets
– including their functionality. Eventually you’ll produce the view shown below
© 2009 IBM Corporation 240


Recall from the TabFolder workshop how to create RUIWidgets from RUIHandlers
 Change the type to RUIWidget
 Change initialUI to targetWidget (and move all elements into a single box, if necessary, as targetWidget can
– at most – refer to a single widget, not an array)
 Start by making RUIWidgets out of: SimpleMenuDemo , and TreeHandler
Make the following modifications to the frameSetLayout
RUIHandler:
Add two new boxes to the header
Add the Tree widget in to the lefDiv
Add a center-aligned graphic (see code) into the footerDiv
Add a # of boxes with children as shown here 
Add image widgets, with src= properties as shown here 
Add the TreeHandler and
SimpleMenuDemo widgets 
© 2009 IBM Corporation 241


Feel free to experiment with: U.I. properties of the existing widgets; add other widgets into the layout divs; add browser/user eventbehaviors you’ve learned
© 2009 IBM Corporation 242


 Run-time Drag & Drop operations refer to Rich UI applications that allow users to pick up (select
– drag) and drop a piece of data or an image – on top or inside of some other some other field or control in the browser. Upon drop some event is fired off, such as:
 A value is changed in a target input text field
 A total is updated – say, as a result of adding a retail item to a shopping cart
 A row (or rows) are moved from one table to another
 Etc.

This kind of live simulation (similar to the control board in “Minority Report”) is very appealing to users
– as it simplifies their workflow.
 As you can imagine, programming this in JavaScript/HTML is no walk-in-the-park. However
EGL Rich UI provides language constructs to simplify the effort.
 They include:
 Events for selecting, dragging and dropping
 A means of creating a temporary container with the dragged control inside
 All the rest of the Rich UI coding structures for advanced dynamic user interface work
 In this workshop, you will create a RUIHandler like this – that allows browser/ruin-time
Drag & Drop behavior for:
- Text values
- Graphics

243 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Inside of the \mySamples\ package, create a new RUIHandler, named: dnd
 From the Slide ***Notes – copy and paste all of the replacement code
 From the EGL source editor, completely replace all of the boiler-plate code
 Review the code briefly (really briefly – a detailed walk-through follows starting on the next slide)
 Save and Preview. Drag & Drop the text field
 Drag and Drop some of the graphic items onto the Shopping Cart
244 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 DND RUIHandler –
Fields and Properties
Of note:
 The “to-be-dragged” widget must have three required eventHandlers that reference
EGL functions:
 onStartDrag
 onDrag
 onDropOnTarget
 An absolute-positioned shadow container widget will be used to contain the dragged widget.
 What this implies, is that:
 When you start dragging the onStartDrag function is invoked (this code is shown on the next slide)
 The function in your code will “copy” the dragged widget inside a Shadow container that is used to show what’s being dragged on-screen
 It looks like you’re dragging the widget but you’ve made a temporary copy of the widget and are dragging the copy around inside a new, dynamically created container
 We have defined a separate group of functions for dragging the image widget. This is not technically necessary, but will make understanding the example easier.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 245


Of note:
 The valueItems() function simply fills in a dynamic record array of:
 Graphic URL strings
 Item price and description strings
 The start function is invoked for the widget with the onStartDrag event handler. This function creates the new, temporary (shadow) container, and in it, creates a new TextLabel and assigns it the text value from the dragged widget
 It makes the shadow container visible
 The drag function is invoked for each mouse movement. It places the shadow container at absolute x/y coordinates +4 from the cursor.
If the widget you’re hovering over is the text2 (our target) widget, it shows you this, by highlighting the background
 The drop function sets the text2 widget’s value equal to the dragged widget’s.text value. It also hides the shadow container and returns the text2 widget’s background to the original (white) color
246 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 DND RUIHandler – Functions for Dragging & Dropping the Image Widget
Of note:
 Like the previous start function, this function is invoked for the widget with the onStartDrag event handler.
This function creates the new, temporary (shadow) container, and in it, creates a new image widget and assigns it the src value from the dragged widget. It also makes the image widget opaque
 It makes the shadow container widget visible
 The drag function is invoked for each mouse movement. It places the shadow container at absolute x/y coordinates +4 from the cursor.
If the widget you’re hovering over is the cartImage (our target) widget, it shows you this by creating a thin gray border around the image.
 The drop function updates a number of internal values with the value from the associated (current) image from the dragged widget
 It also hides the shadow container and returns the boxCart’s widget’s borderWidth back to zero.
247 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Optional Workshop Your Very Own Drag and Drop-Able Top 5 List – 1 of 3
Assume that you were to create a Drag & Drop widget as follows:
 There are five TextField widgets – that are initially valued as 
 You need to allow users to:
 Enter new values (these are after all, TextFields)
 Drag and drop individual TextField widgets on top of other
TextField widgets – swapping the contents of both the dragged and dropped widgets

Process:
 Create a new RUIHandler
 Copy/Paste the following artifacts from the DND RUIHandler into your new RUIHandler:
 Shadow
 myTextField
 The start(), drag() and drop() functions

Then, make the following code additions/modifications to the widget declarations
248
If you’re pressed for time, check the Slide ***Notes
© 2009 IBM Corporation

 Optional Workshop Your Very Own Drag and Drop-Able Top 5 List – 2 of 3
Changes to the start() function
Add this function:
Changes to the drag() function
249 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Optional Workshop Your Very Own Drag and Drop-Able Top 5 List – 3 of 3
Changes to the drop() function
A complete sample solution is in the Slide ***Notes (you’re welcome)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 250


 Data Tables are a very popular and common way to organize and display data in business applications.
 EGL Rich UI ships with a powerful and flexible widget that allows the programmer to display data and manipulate it in many ways. It’s called the Grid widget.
 When we are done with this workshop having learned how to use the Grid widget, we will have created a view similar to this…
Sort-able
Column Headers 
Alternate
Row
Colors
251 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In order to complete this exercise, we will need some data to work with
 For learning purposes, we will provide you with some hard coded data
 Let’s first create a package for our data.
 Right-click over the EGLSource source folder and select New  EGL Package
 At the screen that pops-up, name the package customerData
 Next right-click over the customerData package and create a new EGL Library
 Name the file CustomerInfo
252 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Delete everything in the customerInfo file.
 You should now have a file with nothing in it
 Copy the code in the notes section of this slide and Paste it into the customerInfo file.
 You should have no errors and see something like the following!
 This file contains a record definition, which uses data items declared above the record.
 The library then declares an array variable of the record type and assigns it values
 Now that we have data to work with, let’s move on to creating a Data Table
253 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 First let’s create a new package
 Right-click over the EGLSource source folder and select New  EGL Package
 At the screen that pops-up, name the package dataGrid
 Next right-click over the dataGrid package and create a new EGL Rich UI Handler
 Name the file DataTableBasics
 Click Finish
© 2009 IBM Corporation 254


 Now, let’s drag a Grid widget onto the RUIHandler
 Make sure to drag the Grid from under EGL Widgets and not Dojo
 When asked for a variable name of your Grid, name it myFirstGrid
 Now switch to the source view of the Rich UI Editor
 Don’t be intimidated by the code!
 We will make sense of it
255 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 First let’s experiment with the columns property
 The columns property takes an array of GridColumn RUIWidgets
 The GridColumn RUIWidget itself has several properties including
– Name – The actual name of the field in the record to be displayed (case sensitive)
– DisplayName
– The name to be used as the column header when the Grid is rendered on the page
– Width – The width of the column
 Adjust the variable declaration so it looks as follows
 Next, delete the data property from the myFirstGrid variable declaration (and don’t forget to delete the trailing comma after the close square bracket – see screen capture)
 Add the following line of code in the initialization function

Note that
.
data is the property of the Grid RUIWidget that corresponds to the detail rows displayed in the grid at run-time. The actual values can be sourced from a service or library call, but what’s significant here, is that a grid widget’s .data
property must be assigned to a dynamic array of type: any[];
256 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Save the page and then go to the
Preview view of the EGL Rich UI
Editor
 Currently only two columns are being displayed, even though each array record of data passed to the Grid widget contains nine fields (we’ll get to the other seven fields later)
 Note the alternating row colors
 Note the gray header cells
© 2009 IBM Corporation 257


 Go ahead and add the following new GridColumns to the Grid variable’s columns property

You should now see a data table on the page with five columns and 14 rows. You should also understand the relationship between dynamically declaring new grid columns, and the columns displayed in a dataGrid widget
 Let’s take a further look into some of the other Grid properties
 Behaviors – The ability to add behaviors to the Grid as a whole
 HeaderBehaviors
– The ability to add behaviors to just the column headers of the data table
258 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Edit the grid variable declaration again to add the following behaviors property.
 The behaviors property accepts an array of behaviors .
 Add the behavior outlined in red below
 Save the page, Preview and examine the results.
 Notice how the cells (except for Customer ID) have almost no padding now
 Why not the Customer ID column?
 How would you change the grid code so that Customer ID does not have a fixed-width?
 What is a “Behavior”?
An EGL Rich UI widget behavior is a defined event handler that is invoked when certain elements in a widget are created.
Behaviors typically do things like change presentation characteristics, add extra widgets, or add extra event handlers.
For Grid, behaviors can be specified on both header cells and data cells. For
Menu, behaviors exist on menu items.
For Tree widgets, a behavior is invoked for each tree node being created.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 259


 Next, let’s create a variable of type GridSelector
 Do so anywhere inside of the RUIHandler (and outside of the initialization function)
 Now return to the behaviors property of the Grid and add the following property (don’t forget the trailing comma after GridBehaviors.tightCells
,
)
 Save the page and Preview. Notice the results:
 Clicking inside of a row will fire off the GridSelector event and turn the row green
 Holding down the
Ctrl key will allow you to click and select multiple rows
260 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 How about another behavior?
 Go ahead and create a new variable of type GridSorter inside of your RUIHandler

 Now add gridSorter.columnSorter
property to the headerBehaviors array
 Save the page and view the results. Click the column headers to re-sort the rows

261 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Another very popular feature in many applications is what’s called a ToolTip. A tool tip is a message that will pop-up when a user mouses (hovers) over something.
 Create the following variable of type ToolTip , and the function called headerTooltips .
 Copy/Paste code available in the notes
 Now return to the headerBehaviors property of the Grid and add the following tool tip as a grid column header behavior.
 Notice that you are referencing the function (headerToolTip s
) and not the Tooltip variable
262 © 2009 IBM Corporation


nd
 Save the RUIHandler code, and note the new functionality
 Now that we have explored many of the functions that the Grid Widget offers, let’s take a look at two final use cases:
 Row Drag & Drop
 Table data cell Drag & Drop
 In the same RUIHandler (DataTableBasics.egl) create the following new Grid
 This Grid will serve as the empty Grid that data is dropped into
 You may get errors because of missing import statements, press Ctrl+Shift+O to fix these errors
263 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Next, let’s add some code onto the RUIHandler that will give us the browser/run-time
Drag & Drop support we learned about earlier in this section of the course. For this part of the lab, Copy/Paste code is provided in the slide
***Notes
.
 Steps:
 Copy the Slide *** Notes code now.
 Place this code anywhere within the EGL functions section of the RUIHandler
 Press Ctrl+Shift+O
– to resolve missing imports for these new statements
 By doing this you have:
 Created a second grid and given it no data
 Placed code that will allow for drag and drop between the two grids onto the RUIHandler
 Now that we’ve got two grids, let’s put them into Rich UI box, in order to get them next to each other. Add the following code to the RUIHandler (Preferably at the top – and don’t forget to press Ctrl+Shift+O to add referenced widget imports)
 Note that we are creating a box and giving it three children. The first two children are Box’s themselves created implicitly (and given our Grids as children). The last child is a Widget which will appear during drag and drop (it is initially set to visibility = hidden)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 264


 Now that we’ve created a new Box to house our Grid’s, let’s go ahead and adjust our
RUIHandler’s initialUI property to take the new Box instead of our first Grid
 Finally, we need to add some more properties to myFirstGrid
 Note that the functions referenced by these properties were defined inside the copy/paste code on the previous slide
 Save and Preview
 Click and select one or more rows as you did before, from myFirstGrid (on the left).
 Then, drag them to mySecondGrid (on the right), dropping them on the grid column header to add the rows.
 Check out all the other grid behaviors to verify that they have been unaffected by adding your new functionality
265 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–

Optional workshop: From inside the myFirstGrid’s behaviors and headerBehaviors , copy/paste properties, and enable mySecondGrid for:
 Alternate row colors
 Column sort
 Tight cells
266 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Drag & Drop is so popular with Web 2.0 applications, that we’re going to cover one final use case – which is cell-by-cell Drag & Drop (see the screen capture below).
As we’ve done in previous workshops, we will annotate and walk through the important aspects of the EGL code
 Note – the code in this Drag & Drop sample is in the: com.ibm.egl.education.widgets project: Feel free to open and Preview before continuing on with these slides.
267 © 2009 IBM Corporation



Recall from your previous Drag & Drop examples that you need to define: 1. behaviors for enabling the Drag & Drop (in this example the behavior is: enableCellDragging . 2. A Shadow widget
– which is an HTML
<DIV> tag, that will be dynamically created at run-time, to contain the value of what is selected and dragged (in this case, a dataGrid cell value).
This is what’s being dragged
© 2009 IBM Corporation 268



Compare this with the previous Drag & Drop example. Note that the only difference between the two is that in this example, you’re dragging a table cell - In actuality? An HTML: <TD> value </TD> .
Study the code below. You should recognize the
EGL Rich UI coding elements annotated for here and more importantly, the coding pattern to do cell Drag & Drop.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 269


 You will definitely need to create a page-able dataGrid for your Rich UI applications. To help you with this, IBM has pre-defined just such a widget, that allows you to customize things such as # of rows displayed, etc.
 Create a new EGL Rich UI Handler called PagingGridBasics under the dataGrid package
 In your new RUIHandler, code the following PagingGrid (or grab the Copy/Paste code for this snippet from the Slide ***Notes, and replace your entire boiler-plate code).
 Note the new widget features:
 PagingGrid widget
 visibleRows property
 Preview 
© 2009 IBM Corporation 270


 Try changing the following properties of the PagingGrid view – and enhance it as follows:
 Add additional columns (note
– get the specifics by looking at customerInfo.Customers)
 Change the visibleRows
 Change the PagingGrid’s general properties:
 BackgroundColor, Height, Width, Color, borderColor/BorderStyle/BorderWidth
 OPTIONAL workshop:
 From the dataTableBasics.egl, copy the code in to do:
 Grid.behaviors:
– Alternate row colors
– Tight cells
– Row selection
 Grid.headerBehaviors
– Column sorting
– Gray cells
– Tooltips
 See next slide for a screen capture of the code needed to the optional lab
271 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 When all else fails, use this… Code what’s below, or hit the Slide ***Notes for a copy/paste solution
 Also – remember that you will need to add in the imports ( Ctrl/Shift/O )
© 2009 IBM Corporation 272

 One more OPTIONAL Use
Case
(Just ‘cause we knew you’d ask)
 How would you get this 
 Paging buttons relocated:
 Bottom
 Right-justified
 Give up? Not so fast…
 From PagingGridBasics.egl
, double-click on: pagingGrid
 Press F3 – enough times to open the pagingGrid.egl
source code in the Editor
 Find the targetWidget= property … what widget does it point to?
 Right: ui - a plain old box, with two children. Okay, so how would we switch the button and grid order?
 Right . Switch their order inside the box properties 
 Now (the $64,000 question)
– “How would you right-justify the buttons in the button box”?
 RIGHT!
Add: alignment=1, to the grid properties

 “It’s all just EGL”,
Chris Laffra, Rich UI Language Architect, February 7 th , 2009
© 2009 IBM Corporation 273


 One question that probably will come to mind sooner – rather than later – is the question of, “how do I select a row in a dataGrid – and take some action based on the row selected?”
 We’ve already seen that you can automatically (calling the gridSelector behavior widget) turn the selected row a different color – but how about actually doing something tangible with the row selected?
 Like opening another dataGrid with rows dependent upon the row selected, etc
 It’s actually very easy to do this – as it’s already built-in to the gridSelector’s functionality. From the
PagingGridBasics ’ code: modify + add the following:
Change to gridSelect properties. Ad a behavior to run on row click: onClick of a dataTable row, use the first occurrence in the selection[…] array (which references the row selected)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 274


Do We Have Time For One More Use Case? (Substituting Other Widget Types in dataGrid Rows)
 Another typical Use Case revolves around substituting complex widgets into dataGrid Rows (in place of the default TextLabels). This is relatively easy to do, but involves using a new IBMsupplied widget, called the EditableGrid.
 Assume you had to create the following view:
 Where:
 All of the fields are editable
 Checkboxes are used for boolean datatypes
 ComboBoxes can be used for selection controls
 The RUIHandler responds to each update ‘event’ – allowing you to save or persist changes
 Let’s see how to pull this together
© 2009 IBM Corporation 275

 Substituting Other Widget Types in dataGrid Rows – 1 of 4
 In the \ dataGrid
\ package, create a new RUIHandler, named: rowWidgetSub
 Copy and paste the code from the Slide ***Notes, over the boiler-plate statements
 Save and Preview.
 Note the run-time behavior:
 Sorting
 Row mouse-over
 Row selection
 Modify a value:
 A text field
 A check box
 Select a different state

Move to (select) a new row

Note that the RUIHandler is “aware” of what row
(and what value) has been updated
Let’s look at the EGL language and coding patterns to do this…
© 2009 IBM Corporation 276

 Substituting Other Widget Types in dataGrid Rows – 2 of 4
 From the EGL statements note the following:
 Standard RUIHandler declaration – although the code to implement the Editable Grid columns is in the start function (next slide)
 Standard Grid widget functionality for: Sorting, Selection
 New widget type – Editable grid – that’s been included in the: com.ibm.rui.widgets.education project
 In this new widget, we are mixing implementations of:
 Behaviors defined in this RUIHandler
 Behaviors defined in the standard gridSelector and gridSorter widgets
 An array of string values (that will ultimately end up as a combo-box)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 277

 Substituting Other Widget Types in dataGrid Rows – 3 of 4

In the start() function we:
 Invoke a widget function to define individual columns for the grid – setting custom properties and specifying validators and/or validValues :
 Note that by default:
- Boolean fields  Checkboxes
- Other types  Edit-able Input fields
- validValues  comboBoxes
 In the grid.setData, we assign an any[] array – as usual
© 2009 IBM Corporation 278

 Substituting Other Widget Types in dataGrid Rows – 4 of 4
 In the remaining EGL functions, we’re exposing the Rich UI coding techniques used to do things such as:
 Mouse-over and Cell-hover
 Alternating rows
 Grid value-changed event-listener (defined)
 These could be embedded in the Editable grid, but are shown here to illustrate the nature of the coding patterns
© 2009 IBM Corporation 279


 Popup pages or dialogs are ubiquitous requirements for business applications. And even have been for decades. We’d better learn how to implement them in Rich UI.
 They relate to some parent widget’s information typically contain:
 Dependent or expansion information on data in some parent widget
 Capturing or selecting information in a display that would simplify data entry
 Showing some exceptional condition or information in an eye-catching manner
 The curious thing? You already have the tools. (No way? Yes way.) Steps:
 Design the popup page (nothing new here)
– except
 Code the properties to:
 Hide/Show the box that contains whatever widgets (or just a widget) you wish to pop up
 (If placing the Popup relative to another widget on-screen) capture and utilize the x/y coordinates of the parent widget – see example
 Code the necessary event-handlers for the processing in the Popup
 In the workshop, we’ll create a RUIHandler which contains a Popup that displays a list of states for selection 
 You will activate the Popup by double-clicking in a field
280 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In the \mySamples\ folder create a new RUIHandler named: dialogHandler
 From the Slide ***Notes – copy and paste the code therein, over the boiler-plate statements
 Save
 Preview
– Click in the State textField 
 Now let’s break the Rich UI code constructs down…
 Consider the following…
 In fieldState – we define an onClick event
 The states string array is just that. You would populate it typically using a call to a Web
Service (next section of this Tutorial)
 The stateValues widget is our popup. It needs its own onClick event-handler (function).
It also needs to be initially hidden and its position must be absolute, in order to dynamically assign it to the x/y coordinates of fieldState
281 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 From initialization, we invoke the function (populateStates) to create the internal array
 selectState is the function that:
 Assigns the x/y coordinates of stateField to the popup list widget
 And unhides the widget
 singleSelFunc assigns the selected value of list widget to fieldState.text, and re-hides the widget
© 2009 IBM Corporation 282


 On your own (or using the screen-shot given below) – create a popup like the one shown here to capture a comment and re-display it
© 2009 IBM Corporation 283

Course
Rich UI and Services
Units:
 Web Services and Rich UI Architecture

Calling a Service - Process Flow (steps)
 Rich UI Service Calls Language Constructs
 Service Calls and the Rich UI Event-Driven
Programming Model

Workshops and Examples

Calling a 3 rd Party Service
 Calling a Mainframe CICS/COBOL Service
 Creating and calling an EGL Web Services
284 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 While RUIWidgets and RUIHandlers are the main focus for creating pages and widgets they are able to call out to EGL Programs, Libraries, and Services.
 However, unlike EGL/JSF – where the vast majority of the work occurred on the server, in the Rich UI environment all EGL parts are generated to JavaScript.
 This helps reinforce a clean separation between:
 Server-Side (business logic/data access)
 Client-Side (U.I. elements)
Business Logic deployed as Web Services EGL Generated RUI JavaScript running in a browser
Service calls tie the UI
Logic to the server side business logic
285 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In Server/Side EGL/JSF applications
 Your business logic accesses and processes data
 Which is bound to .JSF components and their underlying Java Classes
 Which – at run-time, emit (generate) HTML tags + data
 Which is sent back to the browser
Emits 
HTML tags
Dynamic
Content
Rendered in the browser Data
Store
Form
 Submit
Java
Classes

Using EGL/JSF, almost everything results in Server-Side Run-Time cycles (relatively little happens in a standalone browser environment)
286 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 In EGL/Rich UI applications
 Your Rich UI application
– which runs in the browser, makes service calls to EGL (or non-
EGL) Server-Side functionality which access enterprise data or enterprise applications
Data
Store
Service
 Calls
JSON
String
Data 
RUIHandler
Application
Generated
JavaScript +
HTML
Rendered in the browser
Server-Side
Application(s)

Users interact with your Rich UI application. Server-side components are cleanly de-coupled from
Client/Side (Rich UI) application functionality. And because a RUIHandler consists of JavaScript running in the browser, there promises to be significant improvements in:
 Server-based application performance – due to functionality/cycles offloaded to the RUIHandler
 Browser-based dynamic processing capabilities and functionality – ummm, simply due to Rich UI
287 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 So, your Rich UI applications depend on web services for their business data I/O.
 There are two categories of service:
 SOAP Web Services – data is transmitted through a standard WSDL
(Web Service
Description Langue) file: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_Services_Description_Language
 You access the WSDL through an EGL interface
– Recall that you learned how to do this in your previous EGL classes or work.
 Note that these Web Services can be:
– EGL Java Web Services
– CICS Web Services – System z
– RPG Web Services – System i
– 3 rd Party Web Services – any language, any computing platform
 REST Web Services – data is typically transmitted in JSON (JavaScript Object
Notation) strings: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Representational_State_Transfer
 In this section we will focus on accessing SOAP Web Services through WSDL files
 We will cover REST services and JSON string handling in an appendix to this course
288 © 2009 IBM Corporation


What you will have to do before calling services from your EGL Rich UI applications:
1. Create or access the WSDL
 If using EGL/Java, follow the steps in the EGL Foundation Tutorial to:
– Ensure that your web (not Rich UI, web server) project’s build file descriptor has the proper options set.
– Create or code a Service part
– Define the Service part to the Services Descriptor
– Generate the WSDL
 If using CICS there are tools in RDz, and Service Flow Modeler to create WSDL files
 If using RPG there are automated facilities in RDi-SOA for creating EGL services (specifically, an
EGL Web Services Wizard)
 If using a 3 rd Party Web Service:
– Access the WSDL
– Ensure that all elements of the WSDL are supported by both the target platform and by EGL
– The toolset will produce validation warnings and diagnostics if there are problems at Generate time
2. Import the WSDL into your Rich UI project and create the EGL Client Interface
3. (Optionally) Test the WSDL using the Web Services Explorer facility
4. Create the service calls from your EGL RUIWidget(s)
– next slide
289 © 2009 IBM Corporation


There are four elements in the statement construction pattern to call a Web Service from an EGL Rich UI view:
1.
Declare the service variable
2.
Code the service call
– which can be broken down further:
1. Call to the service.function(…)
2. The parameter list
3. The service callback reference
4. The service exception handling function reference
3.
Code the Web Service Callback Function
4.
Code the Web Service exception-handling function
 Note these elements in this simple example
Dude…what’s a “Callback
Function”?
Hang on –we’ll be getting to that shortly.
© 2009 IBM Corporation
3.
1.
2.1.
2.3.
2.4.
4.
2.2.
290


call serviceName.operationName(argumentList) returning to myCallbackFunction onException myExceptionHandler {timeOut = milliseconds};
• serviceName
• Name of a variable based on an Interface part (see previous section on creating an EGL interface from a WSDL
• operationName
• Name of the Interface part’s function
• argumentList
• List of arguments, each separated from the next by a comma.
• myCallbackFunction
• Name of a callback function that is available to the call statement. In most cases, the function is in the same Rich UI handler or in a library.
• myExceptionHandlerFunction (Optional)
• Name of a exception handler that is available to the call statement. In most cases, the exception handler is in the same Rich UI handler or in a library.
Most of the above does not represent “ new learning stuff ”, except for possibly the
“callback function”. So let’s dig into that a little more…
291 © 2009 IBM Corporation


function callBackFunc(Positional Parameter List)
//assign data returned from service call to Rich UI fields
//(optionally) do other processing end
• Positional Parameter List
• You will need to define one argument for each out or inout parameter in the Web Service function call associated with the Callback
• Including one for the return argument
• These parameters must “datatype match” – positionally with the Call statements arguments to the Web Service call WebService.Function (arg1, arg2, arg3) returning to callBackFunction…
Function callBackFunction (arg1Type, arg2Type, arg3Type, returnType)
//assuming the Web Service has a returns(dataType) argument function serviceExceptionFunc(excp anyException in) end
//Parse the excp fields
//Take action depending on the what has happened
Example 
(Code in Slide ***Notes)
292 © 2009 IBM Corporation


EGL functions that respond to asynchronous and preemptive browser or system events (a system event example might be the return of control from a Service call to a RUIHandler) are self-contained – that is, they are modular and independent or isolated packets of code. The antithesis of monolithic programs.
 This event-driven software model requires that you manage – programmatically direct – the return of control from an event to the appropriate EGL Function that will handle the event. Such a function might:
 Move data from a service-based data access call to an array that populates a Grid
 Validate user data entry – returning appropriate error messages
 Redirect to some other functionality, inside or out of your RUIHandler, etc.
 The common name for this kind of function is: “Callback” Function
 You can think of a Callback Function simply as an event handler that is called by the event dispatcher in response to an asynchronous event

When a browser event invokes one of your EGL functions you specify ( associate ) the Callback function to your EGL logic
Function through the through the Events tab
 When a system event (i.e. a return from a Service call) invokes one of your EGL Functions, in order for it to do so you must have specified the name of the EGL Function in the returning to modifier of the Service call statement
293 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Do processing
…
Call a service 
Wait …
Wait …
Wait …
Wait …
Service call returns! 
…
Do more processing
…
Procedural Run-time model
(Next Sequential Instruction programming idiom)
What does the above have to do with events?
See next slide for yet more details…
© 2009 IBM Corporation 294
Do processing
…
Call a service 
(Specify a “Callback” Function)
…
Do more processing
…
Service call returns! 
(“Callback” Function is automatically invoked)
…
Do more processing
…
Rich UI Run-time model
(Modular, independent functions)

Do InitialProcessing
Render RUI view in the browser
Event
- onClick captured in
RUIHandler, handled as an EGL Function
Call a service (note that calling a service does NOT pre-req. a browser/user event)
Events in the
Browser
User clicks a button

Control immediately returns to the browser
Database
Enterprise Data
© 2009 IBM Corporation
Event Service call returns
(EGL “Callback” Function automatically invoked)
Do something with data from the service call
Event
Pipeline RUI Handler (EGL) code
295


Time for a lab! Let’s see how much of the previous material sunk in. The only way to find out?
Develop a Service Call from scratch, and run it from a Rich UI application.
You will use an existing WSDL
– so at the risk or repeating ourselves, the steps are:
1. Access the WSDL
2. Import the WSDL into your Rich UI project and create the EGL Client Interface
3. (Optionally) Test the WSDL using the Web Services Explorer facility
 Well no … we will skip this step for now
4. Create the service calls from your EGL RUIHandler and Preview (test)
Return Current
Weather information
In an XML string
© 2009 IBM Corporation onClick Event
Rich UI
Call Service
Passing:
- City Name
- Country
CallBack Function text returned
296


rd
 Open a browser and go to www.xmethods.net
 When the page loads, click View the Full List
 When the Full List is done loading, do a search for Global Weather
 Find and click on the following result:

297 © 2009 IBM Corporation


rd
 At the next page, right-click over the WSDL file and select Save Link As…

 From there, change the file type to All Files and add the
extension to the
File Name. Hint: Make sure to save the WSDL in a location where you can find it.
 Return to the EGL Rich UI editor and Right-click over the EGLSource folder.
 Create a new package called wsdl
 Find &copy the globalWeather.wsdl
file you just saved, and paste it into the wsdl package
298 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Your project should now look as follows!
 Right-click over the WSDL file and select EGL Services  Create EGL Client
Interface…
© 2009 IBM Corporation 299


 A wizard will pop-up. Click
Finish
 You should now have a new package and EGL File automatically created for you.
The file should look like this… (note the functions and string parameters)
 At this point, from Project Explorer:
 Select your EGLRichUI project
 Right-click and select Generate
© 2009 IBM Corporation 300


 Now, right click over the NET.weberviceX.www
package and create a new EGL
Rich UI Handler File.
 Name the file
Weather
 Next, code the following UI Components!
 Copy/paste code available in the notes
© 2009 IBM Corporation 301


(to call the Service)
 Next, add the layoutBox and resultString to the RUIHandler’s initialUI property.
 Save the file, you should now have the following output.
 Next, let’s add an onClick event to the Button
 This event will call the service and store the result in resultString
 To call the service, we will simply create a variable of the Service Interface (take a look at the code that was generated for us if you’re confused)
 From there we can use a basic call statement to call the service function, and then specify a callback.
 The callback is a function that will execute when a result is returned from the service call.
 The input parameter for the callback function must match what the service returns
302 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Code (or use Copy/Paste code from the Slide ***Notes) the following three functions in the RUIHandler
 The function fired off by the onClick event
 This function will make the actual service call to the weather service
 The Callback function for the service
 That assigns the value returned (if any)
 The onException function
– that uses some advanced EGL string “casting” (redefining the excp record on the fly) to format and display run-time error messages
© 2009 IBM Corporation 303


 Give the page a shot
(note that only major international cities are available
– i.e. Paris, London, NY, Pittsburgh,
Raleigh, etc. Missing are places like Glen Rock, Wake Forest, Coventry, etc.)
 As you shall see, this particular service returns an XML string into the .text
property of the resultString RUIWidget
© 2009 IBM Corporation 304


So now, we’ll really find out how much of the previous material sunk in. It’s time for you to develop a Web
Services call from a Rich UI application without being given all the explicit steps.
Again, from the www.xmethods.net
site:
 Select the Full List and do a find on:
Amortization
 Copy down the Amortization Calculator’s wsdl (save it in your \wsdl\ folder as a
.wsdl
file
Use the tooling to generate an interface to the WSDL and call the service:
 Generate the EGL Services > Create EGL Client Interface – and note the code produced takes parameters all of type: float
 Create a new RUIHandler named: amortizationCalc
 And either on your own – or using the EGL RUIHandler code in the notes page, define variables and functionality for calling the Web Service
305 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 So – if we’re to believe the hype surrounding Web Services then how different or how much harder ) would it be to call a mainframe, CICS/COBOL web service?
 Answer: Not hard/not different. Skeptical? (fair enough…let’s see try one on for size)
 In the com.ibm.egl.education.widgets project, there’s a WSDL file named: EPSCSMR.wsdl
 This WSDL was created by Regi Barosa/IBM using RDz tooling. It calls a CICS/COBOL subroutine to
(yes, once again!) calculate mortgage rates. This services runs on an IBM mainframe in Dallas, TX

From the above, what are the inputs ? How could you figure out the data types (hint – use the
WSDL editor’s Source mode)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 306


–

Copy the EPSCSMR.wsdl
file, from the education project to your EGLRichUI project – and put it in the
\WebContent\wsdl\ folder.
As you’ve done twice now, use the tooling to create the EGL Interfaces for the EPSCSMR.wsdl file.
- Note that you will get two separate source files:
* EPSCSMRTIInterace – the inputs needed to call the CICS Web Service on the host
* EPSCSMRTOInterface – essentially the output or returned data from the CICS/COBOL program
The EGL Rich UI coding pattern will be:
 Call the CICS/COBOL Service with the inputs
 Return to the Callback Function from the CICS/COBOL Service receiving the outputs as parameters
© 2009 IBM Corporation 307


–
 Using your prodigious EGL Rich UI programming skills, create the following simple U.I. in your \sandbox\ package:
 We named ours: regisService – but you can pick any name you like
 And … well…okay (you twisted our arms)
 Since there’s really nothing new in the U.I. use the Copy/Paste code in the Slide ***Notes
© 2009 IBM Corporation 308


–
 Here’s what the onClick function should look like.
 As before, you can develop this by hand, or use the Copy/Paste code in the Slide ***Notes
 Is there anything new in these statements? Not really. A useful technique though, is to change the button text and disable it while the Web Service is off being accessed.
 Also the Input variable of type: DFHCOMMAREA has an import for it (see prior Slide ***Notes)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 309


–
 Here is the CallBack and onException function. The only new coding construct herein is the fully-qualified parameter type on: displayResults_cics
 This coding pattern is necessary because there’s already a record named: DFHCOMMAREA that’s being referenced through an import statement
 You can copy this code from the Slide ***Notes (it’s probably easier than typing it all in)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 310


–
 Preview the RUIHandler
 Enter values such as those shown in this screen capture 
 And click the button.
 The actual functionality is running on an IBM mainframe in Dallas, TX

Try passing different values in to the Web Service for:
 Amount
 Rate
 Term
Note the response time and speedy performance
(not bad for an old mainframe)

 Now it’s time to move on, and work with EGL-generated Web Services. We’ll start by reviewing the steps needed to create a Web Service then generate the WSDL, then we’ll discuss using the WSDL in your Rich UI project.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 311


– Steps for Creating and Consuming Web Services
Here are the steps you will take to create a Web Service – from your Web or Application server project:
1.
Start Tomcat – or WebSphere (see ***Notes )
2.
Customize your project’s Build File
3.
Create and generate a Web Service
 Code the service
 Generate the service
4.
Generate the WSDL for your Service – may need to customize the service port (end point)
5.
Test the WSDL Using Web Services Explorer
6.
Consume the Web Service
 (If using a 3 rd Party WSDL) Import or copy the EGL-generated WSDL to your Client/Project
 Generate or create the EGL Client Interface(s) from the WSDL
 In the EGL Rich UI process - code a variable of <serviceName> type
 Code the call to the ServiceVar.function – passing parameters and returning to a Callback function
 (From the Servers Tab in the Web Perspective)
or start WebSphere
Note that if you don’t have a server yet defined for your project, create one before continuing
312 © 2009 IBM Corporation


(Review) Customize Your Project’s Build-File – and Generate Your Project
 You need to select the serverType you will be publishing the Web
Server to
 Open EGLWeb.eglbld
 Un-check Show only specified options
 Scroll down to find the serverType option
 Use the combo-box to select the serverType for your project
 WEBSPHERE
 TOMCAT
Select the serverType 
313 © 2009 IBM Corporation


(Review) Create a new EGL Web Service
 In your server-side project (i.e. NOT in your Rich UI project) you will create your custom EGL
Web Services - typically (although not necessarily) in a package named something like
\services\ under \EGLSource\
1. Create a New > Service
© 2009 IBM Corporation
2. Check:  Create as web service
314
See
***Notes


(Review) Create a new EGL Web Service – continued
Recall that EGL Services are simply EGL business logic parts.
 As such they allow full programming access to the complete EGL language.
 From EGL Services you can:
 Access data:

DB2, Informix, DL/I, VSAM/QSAM, MQ, CSV (Excel spreadsheet) files
– and other sequential files
 Access existing EGL applications and business logic
 Access mainframe functionality:

System z
– COBOL/CICS, IMS TM (MPP/QBMP) programs

System i
– RPG, CL or COBOL programs
– The above COBOL programs can be native (hand-coded) or EGL-generated
 Access Java applications an frameworks
 Access C/C++ .DLLs and applications
…etc…
 Here’s a sample Service 

After ensuring that your project settings are complete:
(From Project Explorer)
315 © 2009 IBM Corporation


(Review) Generate the WSDL for Your Web Service
You will then Generate the Web service - From Project Explorer
After successfully generating the WSDL, you can open it in the Content Area – it’s located under: \WebContent\WEB-INF\wsdl\
 Optionally, you can test the Web Service
 But before continuing, you may need to customize the WSDL “end-points” – the port# for the WSDL address.
 Note: An “end-point” is the URL ( ping-able web address ) of where your application server is “listening” for incoming calls to your Web Service.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 316


(Review) Test the Web Service – Interactively – 1 of 2

RBD contains an interactive
Web Services test facility called the Web Services Explorer.
You can use this tool to test your
Web Service functionality effectively, before embedding calls to it from your service client.
You invoke the Web Services Explorer by:
 Right-Clicking over the generated
.wsdl file
 Selecting: Test with Web Services
Explorer
317 © 2009 IBM Corporation


(Review) Test the Web Service – Interactively – 2 of 2
 This opens the Web
Services Explorer – and opens your Service in the Navigator
 All of the services functions are exposed as
Actions for you to test.
 You will fill in parameter values, press Go and view the results in the
Status view
*** Your Application
Server must be still be started
318 © 2009 IBM Corporation


(From your Rich UI Project) Create an EGL Client Interface to the WSDL
From Project Explorer in your EGL Rich UI project you will:
 Right-click over the WSDL

Select: EGL Services
> Create EGL Client Interface…
© 2009 IBM Corporation 319


(Review) Create an EGL Client Interface to the WSDL
If a duplicate EGL part name exists, you will need to rename the EGL source and interface files
 The EGL source file name
 The Interface name
Note – that this will be the exception, not the rule in calling services from EGL Rich UI
© 2009 IBM Corporation 320


 Time to roll up the sleeves and create some of our own services:
 From your EGLWeb project:
 Start your web or application server
 Create a new Service part in the
\EGLSource\services\ folder, named:
RUIServices
Be sure to check:
 Create as WEB (SOAP) service 
 If you’re prompted to
Deploy the EGL Service?
 Allow the tooling to generate and deploy the
Service to your application server before continuing
321 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Here is the code for Logging in 
 We’re using the old Siteuser table that has USER_ID and Pass_Word columns
 You can either code this from scratch, using explicit SQL, or copy/paste this function from the
Slide ***Notes
 When you’ve saved and all syntax errors are cleaned up:
 From Project Explorer,
 Generate the entire EGLWeb project
This will create a wsdl folder under
\WebContent\WEB-INF\
 With your new RUIServices.wsdl file in it
© 2009 IBM Corporation 322


 Before proceeding with additional UI work (and potentially complicating your testing process) –
From Project Explorer:
 Right-click over the RUIServices.wsdl
 Select Web Services > Test with WebServices Explorer
 Select loginService – and type values for: uid and pwd - click Go
 In the Status area, verify a (true) return code from the service call
 Note that you may need to restart your application server, in order to publish and run
© 2009 IBM Corporation 323


 So, now we’re ready to do unto the EGL Web Service, as we did unto the 3 rd Party Services.
From Project Explorer
 Copy the wsdl file: from EGLWeb project to the EGLRichUI project. Put it in a \WebContent\wsdl\ folder
 Note that you may have to create the new
\wsdl\ folder under
\WebContent\
 Right-click over the wsdl and select:
 EGL Services >
 Create EGL Client Interface…
Generate the EGLRichUI project
© 2009 IBM Corporation 324


 So – let’s see how we did?
 Open your loginPage.egl, and modify the existing business logic. It’s probably best at this point, to copy/paste the code in from the Slide ***Notes
 Here’s the finished product. What’s new?
The USERID field The PASSWORD field
 Answer:
 Nothing
 Which rocks.
How about one more?
© 2009 IBM Corporation 325

 So, let’s combine the dataGrid you’ve been learning about with Services. This workshop will show you an end-to-end process where you:
 Create a Web Service that returns an array of customer records, based on a search argument
 Create a RUIHandler that:
 Calls the service – passing a user-entered-partial string
 Returning (in the Callback function) all of the rows found into the dataGrid
 The visual representation of the runtime architecture is shown in this picture… onClick Event
RUIHandler
Call Service
Function
© 2009 IBM Corporation
EGLWeb Project
Service
WebSphere
Tomcat
Service
326
EGLDerbyR7
RUIHandler
Callback
Function


 Same steps as before
 From your EGLWeb project:
 Make sure that your web or application server is started
 Create a new Service part in the \ EGLSource\services \ folder, named: customerServices
Be sure to check:  Create as WEB (SOAP) service
327
 Here is the code for accessing customer table data
 You can either code this from scratch, using explicit SQL, or copy/paste this function from the Slide ***Notes
When you’ve saved and all syntax errors are cleaned up:
 From Project Explorer,
 Generate the entire EGLWeb project
This will create a wsdl folder under
\WebContent\WEB-INF\ containing your new customerServices.wsdl file
© 2009 IBM Corporation


As before, you may want to test with the Web Services Explorer
From Project Explorer:
 Right-click over the customerServices.wsdl
 Select Web Services > Test with WebServices Explorer
 Select getCustomerSearch – and type values for custString: S
 Click Go
 In the Status area, verify a (true) return code from the service call
 Note that you may need to restart your application server, in order to publish and run
 Optionally – you might want to test getOneCustomerSearch
328 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Copy the wsdl file: from EGLWeb to EGLRich UI – and put it in the \WebContent\wsdl\ folder
 Rightclick over the wsdl and select: EGL Services > Create EGL Client Interface…
 Generate the EGLRichUI project
© 2009 IBM Corporation 329


So – it’s time to call customerServices from a RUIHandler
 In the \ mySamples
\ folder, Create a new RUIHandler named: customerSearchGrid
 Copy/paste the code in from the Slide ***Notes – and overlay the boilerplate EGL source
Note the various widgets
- Note especially the code that calls the
Web Service
 Save and run
© 2009 IBM Corporation 330


In customerSearchGrid:
 Uncomment processGrid – note that this is a custom behavior, for grid widgets. It allows you to substitute widgets for the defaults in rows. Note the reference to this in the widget declaration
Calling the getOneCustomerSearch Web Service, populate a RUIHandler like this 
 Notes:
 The UI is not that important …but…
 Copy/Paste code is found in the next slide
 You will need to make sure that you import the correct version of the customer record – to match the type referenced
© 2009 IBM Corporation 331


The solution Copy/Paste code is in the slide notes. Note the following run-time elements and events…
 onClick Event
RUIHandler
Call Service
Function
© 2009 IBM Corporation
EGLWeb Project
Service
WebSphere
Tomcat
Service
332
EGLDerbyR7
RUIHandler
Callback
Function

 OPTIONAL LABS – Code Free Workshop – Get Orders for a Customer – 1 of 6
 Copy/Paste code is in the slide notes
(function name mis-spelling and all).
Note the following run-time elements and events…
 Create a new Web Service in your EGLWeb project
 This service should have a function that takes in an integer – representing a customer_ID and returns an array of order records for that customer
 Generate your EGLWeb project

Restart your app-server
© 2009 IBM Corporation 333

 OPTIONAL LABS – Code Free Workshop – Get Orders for a Customer – 2 of 6
 Test your new Web Service with the Web Services Explorer facility
© 2009 IBM Corporation 334

 OPTIONAL LABS – Code Free Workshop – Get Orders for a Customer – 3 of 6
 Copy the WSDL from your EGLWeb to your EGLRichUI project, and generate an EGL Client
Interface…. Then – from Project Explorer, Generate your EGLRich UI Project
© 2009 IBM Corporation 335

 OPTIONAL LABS – Code Free Workshop – Get Orders for a Customer – 4 of 6
 From PagingGridBasics.egl:
 Copy the existing myPagingGrid pagingGrid specifications and paste them inside the file
 Make the modifications to the: columns and gridSelector shown below
 Note: Type VERY VERY carefully
© 2009 IBM Corporation 336

 OPTIONAL LABS – Code Free Workshop – Get Orders for a Customer – 5 of 6
 Still from PagingGridBasics.egl:
 Add the functions, and make the modifications shown below
 Once again, type VERY carefully
VERY
 Okay, okay – you win. This slide contains the finished code in the ***Notes
337 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 OPTIONAL LABS – Code Free Workshop – Get Orders for a Customer – 6 of 6
 Preview and test the RUIHandler
© 2009 IBM Corporation 338

IBM Software Group
Creating an end-to-end RESTful Service
Chris Laffra
®
© 2009 IBM Corporation


 From your EGLWeb project:
 Create a new Service part in the
\EGLSource\services\ folder, named: RUIRestServices
Be sure to check:
 Create as WEB (REST) service 
 Here is the service code
 You can either code this from scratch, or copy/paste this function from the Slide ***Notes
 When you’ve saved and all syntax errors are cleaned up:
 From Project Explorer,
 Generate the entire EGLWeb project
 If you have not deployed your service yet, do it now by running it on the
Tomcat server you selected before:
© 2009 IBM Corporation 340


 In the Project Explorer, right-mouse click your service and say:
 EGL Services
 Extract Interface…
 In the wizard, select the EGLSource folder in the RUI Project
 Copy the RUI code from the Slide ***Notes
 All EGL REST services use this pattern:
 http://<Server>:<PortNumber>/<ProjectName>/restservices/<ServiceName>
 Note: If you are seeing errors, make sure to
 Generate your service project
 Run your service on Tomcat
 Verify that Tomcat is using port 8080
 You have 2 projects:
 A service project that is deployed on TOMCAT
 A RUI project that invokes the service using an interface
341 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
Rich UI Inter-Program
Communication
Units:
 Inter-Program Communication

Invoking functions in other Widgets and
RUIHandlers

InfoBus
 Comprehensive Workshop
 The Web 2.0 Development Process with Rich UI
 The workshop

Appendix
342 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Independent entities
Forwards to
JSF Application
RUI “Application”
Composed of
RUIWidget
(RUIHandler)
Invokes
ExternalType
Invoke existing JavaScript
Composed of
RUI Handler
Invokes
RUI Handler
Invokes
Calls function in
RUI Handler
“embedded part”
RUI Library
UI Logic, Service Calls
Calls function in
RUI Library
UI Logic, Service Calls
Composed of
RUIWidget
(RUIHandler)
Accesses Server Side Data
Enterprise Applications
© 2009 IBM Corporation
Java
…or…
RPG
…or…
COBOL
EGL Server Side
Processes
Services
Libraries Programs
343
MQ
Databases
SQL or other
File I/O
External Files
DL/I

A scaled-down model of an EGL Rich UI application might be a single RUIHandler – composed of several RUIWidgets.
 Each RUIWidget is composed of one-tomany elementary widgets (similar to a record / group fields and elementary fields)
 Both RUIHandlers and RUIWidgets have:
 Properties
 Behaviors
 All of the properties and behaviors:
 Are exposed in EGL Rich UI model
 Can be specified ( programmed ) according to the requirements of your application
 From this example – can you find the following elements
– RUIHandler , which is composed of:
 A text field (an elementary) RUI Widget as header text (in blue)
 RUIWidget #1 – which is composed of:
 Eight input fields, Eight Text fields, Two buttons,
 RUIWidget #2 – a Tab Control RUIWidget which is composed of:
 An Employee List RUIWidget

Three other tabs
– which contain additional RUIWidgets (within the tabs)
344 © 2009 IBM Corporation

From any RUIHandler:
 You can add any RUIWidget or RUIHandler to the main/parent RUIHandler as a variable
 You can access and manipulate the variable RUIWidget’s/RUIHandler’s public properties with carte’ blanche. And you can also invoke the added RUIWidget’s/RUIHandler’s public functions through either:
Direct calls, Delegates or using a Rich UI messaging system known as the InfoBus
Best
Practice
Advice

You would use Direct Calls when the functionality in question was tightly-coupled

You would use the InfoBus when the functionality in question was loosely-coupled (i.e. when for example you were creating Web 2.0 “mash-up” applications)
WidgetVariable {Declared access to Properties}
…
Can manipulate non-private WidgetVariable properties and can invoke non-private
WidgetVariable functions using EGL Rich UI statements
…


Can use either the InfoBus or direct calls to invoke a function in SomeOtherRuiHandler
//Functions
…
Can manipulate non-private WidgetVariable properties and can invoke non-private
WidgetVariable functions using EGL Rich UI statements
…
345 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
To understand how easy it is to access and manipulate Widget properties from a
RUIhandler do the following:
 From: \ mySamples
\ create a new, RUIHandler named: embeddedRUIWidget
 Replace the boiler-plate EGL code, with the Slide
***Notes statements
 Study the statements
– and note the use of the .dot syntax to reference widget variable properties
 Save
 Preview
 Click the button

So – that’s how easy it is to extend RUIWidgets and their properties through their use (and reuse) in custom RUIHandlers. Now let’s look at calling functions in
RUIWidgets.
346 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
To understand how easy it is to invoke functions in a Widget variable from a RUIhandler do the following:
 Edit the EGL source in: embeddedRUIWidget
 Add the code shown here in the screen capture:
 Note that some of the functions have been collapsed in the source view
 Save
 Preview
 Click the button

So – that’s how easy it is to extend RUIWidgets, setting their properties and calling their functions from custom RUIHandlers. Now let’s look at calling functions using the InfoBus
347 © 2009 IBM Corporation


Hop on the InfoBus – Calling From one RUIHandler or RUIWidget to Another
 RUIHandlers and RUIWidgets – like the EGL Functions they contain – are independent programming units. As such when you wish to invoke an EGL function in RUIHandlerB – from an EGL function in RUIHandlerA you will actually post a message (fire an event) on an EGLsupplied runtime system called the “ InfoBus ”.

This is how it works.
 “Called” RUIHandler – typically in a “start-up” function subscribes to ( registers a listener for) an
InfoBus message identified by a string parameter value. This string is the event name.
EGL Function to invoke
…named in subscribe
EGL event handling Function. Note two Parameters InfoBus Message Identifier (event)
 The “Calling” RUIHandler – in the EGL function that will be used to invoke the function in RUIHandlerB
“ publishes ” a message to the InfoBus – with two parameters:
InfoBus Message (event) Identifier
(spelled exactly the same as the subscribe parameter)
348
Parameter value passed in as the 2 nd variable

“Called” RUIHandler or RUIWidget
…
Startup EGL Function
…
InfoBus.subscribe(“eventID”, functionName);
Subscribe to (listen for) any event named: eventID

EGL Function named in subscribe(parm1, parm2)
… 

User clicks a button
InfoBus
“Calling” RUIHandler or RUIWidget
…
EGL Function invoked by some event that should call/invoke the other RUIHandler
InfoBus.publish(“eventID”, variableValue);
…
… other functionality
…
© 2009 IBM Corporation 349
Publish a message for an event named: eventID
The InfoBus will find the named listener: “eventID” and will invoke the EGL function in the subscribe statement



–
 To understand how easy it is to publish and subscribe on the InfoBus in order to call a Widget function from a RUIhandler (or in this case, another RUIHandler’s function from a RUIHanlder) do the following:
 From: \ sandbox
\ create a new, RUIHandler named: embeddedHandler
 Replace the boiler-plate EGL code, with the Slide
***Notes statements
 Study the statements
– and note the use of the .dot syntax to reference widget variable properties
 Save embeddedHandler is now listening for an
InfoBus message mamed:
“myInfoBusMsg” And when a message with that name arrives, the function:
showPublish is invoked automatically
350 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
To understand how easy it is to publish and subscribe on the InfoBus in order to call a
Widget function from a RUIhandler (or in this case, another RUIHandler’s function from a RUIHanlder) do the following:
 From: \ sandbox
\ create a new, RUIHandler named:
InfoBusTest
 Replace the boiler-plate EGL code, with the Slide
***Notes statements
 Study the statements
– and note the use of the .dot syntax to reference widget variable properties
 Save
 Preview
 Click the button embeddedHandler is now listening for an
InfoBus message mamed:
“myInfoBusMsg”
351 © 2009 IBM Corporation


–
Preview InfoBusTest

… and click the button

 Create widget instance
InfoBus
System
Library
352 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Workshop – RUIHandler/RUIWidget Interoperability – Another Example – 1 of 4
 Let’s apply our new Rich UI coding skills used to demonstrate the interoperability of
Widgets to a more interesting use case – our tabFolder.

We will demonstrate the following:
 RUIHandler calling RUIWidget (variable):
 Properties
 Function
 RUIWidget calling back to a RUIHandler (parent) using the InfoBus
 Note this is a somewhat complicated use case. If you have any questions on the reasons for any of the coding constructs behind the lab steps, ask your instructor to explain
 Steps:
 Open the following files into the Content Area:
 tabSample.egl, groupingSample.egl, htmlWidgets.egl, miscWidgets.egl, textFields.egl
 Make the following changes to the existing code:
 In groupingSample.egl
– modify the changeLabel(…) function

By doing this, you are publishing an event to the InfoBus that will be picked up in tabSample, and used to open a different tab based on clicking the button in the RUIWidget
> Save your changes to groupingSample.egl
© 2009 IBM Corporation 353

 Workshop – RUIHandler/RUIWidget Interoperability – Another Example – 2 of 4
 In tabSample:
 Modify the initialization() function – as shown below
 Add the callBackFunction(…) as shown here
© 2009 IBM Corporation 354

 Workshop – RUIHandler/RUIWidget Interoperability – Another Example – 3 of 4
 Still in tabSample:
 Modify the tabSelected(…) function – as shown below

Save your coding changes to all the .egl files
355 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Workshop – RUIHandler/RUIWidget Interoperability – Another Example – 4 of 4
 Preview. Test the functionality by following this script:
 When the view loads, click Grouping Sample – note the following:
– tabSample changed the top box’s color to Moccasin
– And it changed the bottom fieldset’s label
 Click the button in Grouping Sample
– Text Fields will open – via an InfoBus message published in groupingSample that is subscribed in tabSample, and used to specify: tab.selected();
– It also changed the rollover graphic in Miscellaneous widget
 Click the Miscellaneous Widgets tab (to verify this)
 Then click HTML Widgets (which changes the rollover graphic in Miscellaneous Widgets)
 So click the Miscellaneous Widgets tab again (to verify this)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 356

 You will design your Rich UI applications as a collection of:
 RUIHandlers – which are reusable components and contain:
 RUIWidgets – which represent widgets
 Custom – may or may not be reusable
 IBM Supplied – example: Textarea, ListBox, Grid, DIV, etc.
 3 rd Party (Silverlight, Dojo, etc.)
 Calls to external JavaScript functionality
 You will put multiple widgets together in a container widget:
 DIV, Box, floatLeft/floatRight, etc.
 RUIHandlers and RUIWidgets may be:
 Visual
 Non-visual (i.e. calls to the business functionality in your system)
 Both
 You will start the initial U.I. layout, by creating and testing your visual elements as
RUIHandlers.
 Then change the RUIHandlers to become RUIWidgets, if you wish to use them in mash-ups or in the dynamic layout of your application in the browser
 Example – hide/show U.I. elements based on business functional processes and rules
357 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
RBD/EGL Development
Units:
 EGL Rich UI – Model View Controller (MVC)
© 2009 IBM Corporation 358

 The programming paradigm or pattern of Model-View-Controller has become somewhat mainstream in recent years.
 A design utilizing this concept will be readable, maintainable, and scalable.
 The concept however is most heavily centered on the JEE programming model. The roles of each are as follows:
 Model – Encapsulates the information (data) and the methods to operate on that information (business logic).
 View – Presents the model (most often a dynamic web page such as a JSP).
 Controller – Processes user events and drives model and view updates.
 To whit:
 Requests by the user are handled by the view and processed by the controller.
 The controller then accesses the business logic contained within the model.
 The model then passes data back to the view which dynamically builds a new UI for the user.
 The process is repeated over again (that’s why this is called a pattern)
359 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 In the realm of Rich UI, this particular use case doesn’t strictly apply. After all, Rich UI is strictly used to build dynamic UI’s!
 You can think of Rich UI as building both the view and controller, which can access the model by making service calls.
 However, the idea of Model-View-Controller is so good that we’ve enabled its concepts when programming in RUI.
 So what do we do?
 We provide a framework that utilizes the concept of MVC to simulate a traditional
HTML form.
 Note that support for some of the standard
DataItem properties (like dateFormatting, and money types) is also done through Rich UI’s
MVC
360 © 2009 IBM Corporation

 Perhaps this is one thing you have been missing when programming in Rich UI?
 Wouldn’t you like the ability to submit an entire form which automatically validates itself!
 Look no further than the MVC framework shipped with Rich UI
 The roles of each are as follows:
 Model – The underlying data accessed from within Rich UI (ex. could be a record or EGL variable)
 View
– The widget displaying the data (ex. A TextField, CheckBox, etc)
 Controller
– The bridge between displaying the data from the model, in the view. The controller also provides a simple interface for validating the input.
 Last but not least, the framework allows us to encompass all of this into a single form.
That form can then be submitted and everything validated at once. Of course, different logic will be implemented by you for each case.
361 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Let’s take a look at this functionality by doing a workshop.
 Create a new package under the EGLRichUI project called mvc
 Next, right-click over the mvc package and create a new Rich UI Library called
ValidationMessages
362 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Inside of the ValidationMessages library, copy/paste the code in the notes and replace any existing text in the file.
 For now lets just skip the explanation of this file and come back to it 
 Next, create a new file under WebContent  properties called
ValidationMessages-en_US.properties
363 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Now copy the text from the notes and paste it into the properties file we just created.
 Next, create a new RUI Handler called EmployeeInfo under the mvc package.
364 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Inside of the EmployeeInfo file, copy/paste the record in the notes below the RUI
Handler
 This record will function as the Model, or the data for our Rich UI Handler.
 Notice how the model correlates with the ValidationMessages record we just created
© 2009 IBM Corporation 365


 So now that we have our model defined, lets go ahead and create the view portion of the implementation (reminder: a view is what will display the data)
 It is only fitting that we create a widget to display each piece of data in the model . In doing so, you will add the following code to the RUI Handler.
 Copy/Paste code is provided in the notes.
 Press: Ctrl/Shift/O
– to bring in the missing import statements
366 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 We have now completed both the model and view portions of the MVC architecture.
 You may be wondering how the model and view are tied together, if so read-on!
 But first, lets create a variable of the Employee record in our RUI Handler
 *** Important
– be sure to select the MVC record for the import.
 Now we will code the controller , which in turn will tie the model to the view
 Don’t worry, the syntax is the same as if we were creating a variable of a normal widget!
 To the right is a sample implementation of a controller
 Notice that we are simply creating a variable of type Controller
 The controller takes an annotated property “@MVC”
 This property accepts a model and a view as parameters
 Notice that the model is simply the data variable, and the view is simply the UI widget variable.
 Once again, press Ctrl/Shift/O
© 2009 IBM Corporation 367


 Creating a controller isn’t so bad is it?
 Now lets create controllers for each field on our page. Copy/paste code is provided in the notes. Since there really is no better way to teach this, the code provided is heavily commented. We will rely on these comments and simple intuition to teach the remaining controller concepts not explained.
 The code in the notes should simply be pasted below the view widgets.
© 2009 IBM Corporation 368


 Note the additional functions we utilize in certain controllers, such as validators
 Remember that the code is heavily commented. Utilize those comments and examine the Controller widget itself in order to understand the remaining functionality available.
 So, now that we have implemented the entire MVC spectrum, what’s left? Well, as we discussed on previous slides, forms are often used to group models, views, and controllers together.
369 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Grouping all of this data so that a single submit can be issued is the ultimate goal of the framework. Doing so will introduce a couple of new widgets!
 Returning to our code, lets create an array of form fields. These are essentially the items we want inside of our form. The syntax consists of a String you would like displayed on the page and which controller it conforms to.
 Add the following code to your RUI Handler above the view code
 Copy/paste code provided in the notes
© 2009 IBM Corporation 370


 Now that we’ve got our form fields, lets create a form!
 Add the following lines of code to your RUI Handler
 Don’t forget to press Ctrl/Shift/O
 Note that this is simply a declaration of a new widget that encompasses the form fields.
 By now you should be realizing that this form is actually a UI widget, meaning it generates and displays components and data on the page.
371 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Finally, we have one last step! We need to create a event that will trigger the submission of the form!
 Let’s add a button to the page that will do just that
 Add the following code…
 Note that we are also adding the button to the initialUI property of the RUIHandler
 Finally, go to the next slide to add the submit logic
372 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Copy the code in the notes section of the slide and paste it into the RUIHandler (for readability’s sake, paste it below the existing functions in the RUIHandler)
 Note that the code is commented sufficiently so that understanding the logic should be intuitive.
 Finally, let’s preview the page…
373 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
RBD/EGL Development
Units:
 JavaScript ExternalType
© 2009 IBM Corporation 374


 So what happens if you’ve already got a bunch of custom JavaScript written within your company?? Does it all go to waste now that you’ve got Rich UI?
 The answer to this question is no. Rich UI provides a way to interface with any custom JavaScript that you may currently have.
 Lets do a workshop that is twofold! We will write and call some logic written in pure
JavaScript, then write and call a widget written in pure JavaScript.
 Create the following folder structure inside of the com.ibm.egl.education.widgets
project under the WebContent folder.
 customJavaScript  functions
 customJavaScript  widgets
375 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Next, under the WebContent  customJavaScript  functions folder, create a new JS file called customFunctions.js
 Once the file is created, copy the code in the notes and paste it into the file.
 Note the constructor , which is simply a function that is executed when an object of this class is created.
 Also note the hello function. This is our custom function which takes a parameter and returns a string!
376 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Next, under the WebContent  customJavaScript  widgets folder, create a new
JS file called customWidgets.js
 Once the file is created, copy the code in the notes and paste it into the file.
 Notice the “showButton” function, which creates our custom widget using pure
JavaScript
377 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Now that we have our custom JavaScript written, lets create an ExternalType to interface with this code!
 Create a new EGL Package under the same project called customJavaScript .
 Next create a new EGL Source File called customExternalTypes
© 2009 IBM Corporation 378


 Now that we have created the custom JavaScript and the ExternalType to interface to that JavaScript, let’s create a RUI Handler and integrate it all together.
 Create a new Rich UI Handler under the customJavaScript package called customExternalTypesDemo
 Note that there is copy/paste code in the notes!
379 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Preview the page and note the functionality.
 Note that the workshop we did was not the traditional hand holding.
 We expect that if you are calling custom JavaScript you are well versed in this genre and should be able to move forward by simply being presented with the concepts!
380 © 2009 IBM Corporation

Course
RBD/EGL Development
Units:
 Deployment
© 2009 IBM Corporation 381

 Deploying a Rich UI application consists of generating all of your code into one single HTML file.
 Doing so is fairly simple, and is done for you by the tooling.
 For deployment you have three options:
 Deploy as straight HTML artifacts
 Deploy into a Dynamic Web Project targeted to WAS
 Deploy into a Dynamic Web Project targeted to Tomcat
 In any case, if services calls are made from within the application, we must make sure that the environment contains the Rich UI Proxy.
 If deploying into a dynamic web project targeted to either WAS or Tomcat, this is taken care of for you!
 If deploying as straight HTML artifacts, a proxy (possibly written in PHP) must be provided manually.
382 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 First lets switch our generation mode to Deployment
 Go to Window  Preferences  EGL  Rich UI
 Once the change has been made, click apply and OK .
 The IDE will prompt you to ask if you want to re-generate all artifacts, simply click OK
383 © 2009 IBM Corporation


 Now that our code has been generated for deployment, lets deploy!
 Right-click over the project and select
Deploy EGL Rich UI Application
© 2009 IBM Corporation 384


 A wizard will pop-up, and for our purposes, we will select the following options.
 Click Next
© 2009 IBM Corporation 385


 On the next screen in the wizard we are given the opportunity to name the output html file, asked where we want the code generated, and given the opportunity to make some globalization settings
 We can either generate the code to an existing project, or have the wizard create a brand new Dynamic Web Project
© 2009 IBM Corporation 386


 Finally click Next and then Finish
 Now expand the project where your code was generated and look under the WebContent folder.
 Notice all of the generated artifacts and the main html file which contains all of the generated RUI Code
© 2009 IBM Corporation 387


 For deployment, there exists one final step!
 We must export and deploy the Dynamic Web Project.
 This can be done by exporting a WAR file, or in the case of a WAS project, exporting an
EAR file.
 As long as you have generated your code to a Dynamic Web Project, all service calls should work since the proxy is also generated!
© 2009 IBM Corporation 388

RBD/EGL Development
Course
Units:
 What is Web 2.0?
 Programming in EGL Rich UI
 Learn EGL Rich UI
 Appendix
 Under Construction
389 © 2009 IBM Corporation