GWT: custom changes to .ui.xml files overwritten (major issue)

[mariusa]

Hi,

Before filling a bug with this, I'd like to understand the intended behavior of roo 1.1 final version.
A common use case, which I just tried, is developing a small app, and customizing the generated .ui.xml files. For example, for Employee entity, I have changed EmployeeDetailsView.ui.xml. Then I've added another field to the entity, resulting in EmployeeDetailsView.ui.xml being regenerated and my changes lost on "mvn gwt:compile". Changes to ScaffoldShell.ui.xml were preserved.

I'd rather have roo/maven detect the file was changed and ask me to overwrite or not (and keep generating the rest of the app - db changes, services etc). I'd also expect it to preseve changes to other files, e.g. I might add an auto-completion widget and handle it myself in the edit view.

Do these use cases make sense? How should them be handled with roo+gwt ?

Thanks

[jlic]

I was thinking about that too, and looks like the Roo GWT team has that in their mind as well. Take a look at http://jira.springframework.org/browse/ROO-937 which is planned for 1.1.0 M4.

But in addition to customizing the scaffolding view, I would be more interested to know how much code I can leverage from Roo+GWT generation if I slap a new gwt ui module to the project. So far I haven't found any doc on it and is still in the process to understand the huge amount of codes thats generated by Roo+GWT. Any hint on the direction to this problem from the Roo-GWT team will be greatly appreciated.