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Design Windows and Web Pages

We are now about ready to start designing our windows/Web pages. Regardless of the fact that we ultimately intend these to be Web pages, we use the window/dialog design facilities within the Toolset. For the sake of discussion, for the remainder of this section we will generically refer to them as windows.

Designing windows generally consists of seven steps:

1. Deciding what data is going to be displayed on the window
2. Creating the information views in the procedure step action diagram necessary to support that data
3. Deciding what GUI controls will be used to represent that data
4. Adding the data GUI controls and related events (if any)
5. Detailing the data-related events
6. Adding non-data GUI controls and related events (if any)
7. Detailing the non data-related events

Any information that you are going to display on a window must have a corresponding export view in the client procedure step action diagram. If you expect to bring that information back into the procedure step action diagram, then you must have a corresponding import view as well. These import and export views are mapped to the corresponding entry field on the window. However, the number of situations in which information needs to be displayed without having to be brought back into the procedure step action diagram for further processing is so low that, in most cases, the import views can look exactly like the export views.

When placing these data fields on the window, you need to decide how that information will be presented. For instance, if you were going to put a field on a window representing a person's gender, that field can be just an entry field in which you type either male or female. Yet, this information can just as easily be presented as a radio button, a check box, or even a drop-down list. The Toolset will default to a particular GUI control based on the number of permitted values for an attribute, or the size of the group view. These defaulted GUI controls can then be changed if required.

For many of these GUI controls, you can define events. For example, you can define a click event for a check box. If someone clicks on that check box, the event handler associated with it will execute. Event handlers are like little paragraphs of code that are executed. Event handlers appear below the main logic of the client procedure step action diagram.

In addition to data-related GUI controls, you can have non data-related GUI controls. Examples of these include push buttons, menus, tool bars, group boxes, and pictures. Some of these can have events assigned to them as well, such as the push button, which often has a click event associated with it.

Finally, the window or dialog as a whole can have events assigned to it as well. For example, if you want a dialog to open with some information already pre-populated, then you can assign an open event to the dialog to get that information.