Comments on ROO-8

[WalterVi]

Comments on ROO-8

Hi guys!
First of all, thanks for this awesome project and the kind support!

I want to share some ideas about this important JIRA Ticket (ROO-8) and some of its related tickets.

I agree with Werner Strydom comments in ROO-8 that more view technologies will be needed in the future and according to what I saw in Roo Code this could be implemented with different addons, like the 8 classes you wrote on the "org.springframework.roo.addon.mvc.jsp" package, in my opinion its quite clear code. Now I'm only going to focus only on the JSP implementation.

1- Customization
Most projects will need to customize each element of every jsp page created, and some of those projects will need a "fully" customized approach. So taking in consideration that Roo is in its beginning stages, a trade-off between "what is written in the jsp implementation" and "Customization Implementation" and "Release Time-Frame" is needed, and Roo users should understand that!

According ROO-310, one approach to resolve this implementation issue could be to generate a custom tag for each "reutilizable element" of every jspx page, and put it (the custom tag) in a directory like the actual three tags you've written in the "/WEB-INF/tags" directory.
This approach will allow :
- everyone to adapt the code according its needs, applying: styles, javascript code from third party libraries, and so on.
- customize one tag and apply it to all jspx pages generated.

Which elements are needed to apply custom tags? In order of importance:

1- Those generated for the CRUD operations
2- The others in any order.

Candidate list of elements:
Most (if not all) elements are contained in a div in the actual implementation, a kind of design without tables. I think this is right because its easier to apply styles and wraps the javascript decorations used by roo.

Common elements
- The div that acts as a container in every page, the one that has the xml namespaces definiton
- The title div
- the submit button
- the create, show, update and delete image the list.jspx

Fields
For each field type, a custom tag for:
- text fields
- numeric fields
- date fields
- combos

In my opinion, the table, tr and td tags could be easily styled with css like the actual implementation.

2- Navigation (Somewhat related to ROO-208)
List.jspx,Create.jspx,Update.jspx: No added comments

Show.jspx:
- Add a king of navigation bar or toolbar or whatever like this to allow the continued navigation once this page has been selected from the menu.
- Add a :
- delete (this selected entity)
- Update (this selected entity)
- Create new
- A finder, a link to list.jspx is ok.

3- May I ask, How are you planning to resolve this issue?

4- Don't forget the Internalization of field labels.

[WalterVi]

I'm thinking about writing and addon to implement this points I've commented out earlier..
What do you think (Ben - Stephan)?
Should I try to modify the code in the actual jsp addon or write a new one that implements this particular customization?

[Stefan Schmidt]

Hi Walter,

Thanks for sharing your thoughts on this.

You will be pleased to hear that the suggestions you made above are pretty much all implemented in my local test environment already . Internationalization is also fully available. I am going to commit these changes to the official Roo trunk as soon as I have it fully working and some of the minor issues have been resolved.

The only thing that I have not taken into account are the suggested usability improvements regarding the extra links in show.jspx. But I think there was already a Jira ticket lodged for this a while back. If you can find it, please add your improvement suggestions there, otherwise it would probably be good to create a new ticket so the ideas don't get lost.

Therefore, there is no need for you to start working on this.

If you want to help out, maybe we can interest you in developing a new addon or help improving existing ones (like ROO-532)?

Cheers,
Stefan

[WalterVi]

Stephan:
-I've sent you a pm.
-I added the ideas to ROO-208 and make a comment on ROO-193.

[WalterVi]

Stephan:
About the rememberme in Spring Security 3.01, it's int the forum, check
http://forum.springsource.org/showthread.php?t=83265

[Stefan Schmidt]

Thanks, that is good to know .