In a Web application, you often need to manage information that is shown to the user. Managing the information means to create, update, or delete information. With WebRatio Platform you can easily model an administration section so that the Web application user can manage the application data.
In t...
In a Web application, feedback messages are used to notify the user about the result of a business logic execution.
Feedback messages vary depending on message types, which can be: success, information, warning, or error.
Most Web applications have protected sections that only registered user can access. Users must remember the credentials provided for each site to which they subscribe.
When users are no longer able to authenticate themselves because they have lost or forgotten their passwords, it is necessary to pr...
In a Web Application, we often need to grant different groups of users access to different resources. For example, in a Web Application used for Enterprise Resource Planning, the head of Human Resources will have access to all the employees’ sensitive data (such as person details, salary, etc.), whi...
Granting access to protected resources is a key aspect of many Web applications.
From an interface point of view, you need to define a place for users to insert and validate their credentials.
This lesson shows you how to model the user login and logout. You will learn how you can personalize the ...
This is the first lesson that explains the Domain Model in WebRatio Platform.
In this lesson, we introduce the main concepts related to the Domain Model, including a deep analysis of the notation adopted - Entity Relationship (E-R). The following lessons show some detailed content and will explain ...
In the lesson dedicated to the Domain Model Overview, you learned about the Entity-Relationship model and its main concepts: Entity, Attribute and Relationship.
The representation of the Domain Model in WebRatio Platform is quite similar to the Entity-Relationship notation ad it is based on the sam...
Learn how to speed up your productivity by letting WebRatio Platform create physical elements on the database starting from your Domain Model, or letting it extract the Domain Model starting from an existing database structure.
Forget about writing SQL by hand! WebRatio Platform helps you generate ...
Learn how to enrich the Domain Model with calculated information, derived from the materialized data existing in the Domain Model itself. This process is called "derivation", since it creates redundant information that can become handy when defining IFML models. Derivation can be applied by using va...
When you are working on a new Web application, you will need to implement a set of common features. In the previous lessons you learned how to model these features in IFML, concentrating on the user interaction.
These features cover how to publish and maintain information, as well as the login ...
When you are working on a Web application you have to consider both the user interaction and the application behavior executed when the user triggers an action. The application behavior can be any kind of business logic you may need to express.
WebRatio Platform provides you with a set of componen...
In a Web application, you often need to manage information that is shown to the user. Managing the information means to create, update, or delete information. With WebRatio Platform you can easily model an administration section so that the Web Application user can manage the application data.
In t...
When you are working on a new Web application there is a set of common requirements that you are going to implement many times. In IFML lessons you learned how to model several commonly recurring requirements focused on the user interaction.
Recurring requirements comprehend how to publish and ma...
WebRatio Platform lets you define graphic containers for content shown to the user. These containers can be reused for many projects and applied to different type of content. This is possible thanks to the ability to create a dedicated resource containing the graphic container code. This resource is...
WebRatio Platform provides you with a set of predefined elements that allow you to model around 90% of the features that are commonly needed by a Web application. However, the remaining 10% may require custom business logic, or integration with a specific external system.
Although it is not possibl...
“Single sign-on (SSO) is a property of access control of multiple related, but independent, software systems. With this property a user logs in once and gains access to all systems without being prompted to log in again at each of them.” (source Wikipedia).
WebRatio allows you to enable the single ...
When you are testing a feature of your Web application, you may face some problems that prevent the feature from working properly. Using the "Application Logs" is the best way to understand what’s going on, find out the root cause of the undesired behavior and eventually understand which part of the...
To get the Web Application from your Web Project, you have to generate it. When a project is generated, the Application Server loads the corresponding Web Application. WebRatio uses Apache Tomcat as the default Application Server Apache.
Tomcat implements the JavaServer Pages (JSP) and Sun Microsys...
Debugging is a fundamental tool for developing a reliable Web application. In the standard debugging approach, every time a problem arises or whenever you want to investigate the behavior of your application, you can easily debug it by placing breakpoints in your lines of code.
Debugging with WebRa...
This lesson gives you the basic knowledge required to define reusable portions of IFML models using the module and module definition concepts.
Working on real-world Web applications may require modeling a large project. In this situation it’s important to be able to manage the project to avoid loss...
This lesson gives you the basic knowledge required to define common content in an IFML Model through the "Master Page" concept.
Working on real-world Web applications may require modeling a large project. In this situation it’s important to be able to manage the project to avoid loss of control and...
In Apache Tomcat, the Manager element represents the session manager that will be used to create and maintain HTTP sessions as requested by the associated Web Application.
Read this article to know how to disable the Persistent Session Management in any Tomcat installation.
WebRatio Platform gives you the chance to add a Captcha control to the forms of your Web Project.
Read this article to know more about the Captcha control.
The Connect Operation is an operation used to enable the association between instances of two entities (the source entity and the target entity), connected by a specific relationship role.
This article guides you to the usage of the Connect showing also a working example.
The Disconnect Operation is an operation used to delete the association between instances of two entities (the source entity and the target entity), connected by a predefined relationship role.
This article guides you to the usage of the Disconnect showing also a working example.
The Reconnect is an Operation Component used to modify the association between instances of two entities (the Source Entity and the Target Entity), connected by a predefined Relationship Role.
The Reconnect can manage single instances or sets of instances in order to connect or disconnect one in...
The Parameter Collector Operation permits one to collect a set of parameters from multiple sources and to redistribute them to multiple targets. In this way, the operation reduces the model complexity by deleting some data flows, improving its reading and creating a neater model.
The Jump Operation permits to jump forward and backward within the application without modeling an explicit navigation flow. A forward jump redirects the user to the specified Parameter Collector Operation. A backward jump redirects the user to the last visited Jump Operation and follows that operat...
Sometimes may happens that a user has to access to a content and depending on some parameters or actions that content has to change. By the alternative pages,it's possible to decide which content has to be shown depending on one or more conditions defined at run time.
Alternative element is usefu...
WebRatio introduced the chance to use Visibility Conditions in a Web Project. This feature allows you to disable or show elements in the generated Web application if the conditions specified for those elements are verified.
It is now possible to integrate the horizontal profiling of the Web appli...
Reloading an entire page can be expensive in terms of computational costs: it means recomputing all the components contained on a page and the queries included in them. This operation can take some time and have a significant impact on performance. For this reason, a partial refresh of the page can ...
Popups are a commonly used rich interaction. By using a popup you can open a new layer above the current main page. If the popup is set as “Modal”, it also prevents any interaction with the rest of the web application. When the popup window is closed, the underlying main page becomes active again, a...
Rich forms are forms in which the user interaction triggers an event and the execution of a specific business logic. The aim is facilitate the form compilation and improve the user’s experience in the web Application. Many events can be managed to enrich the user’s interaction with a form, and some ...
Autocompletion allows you to specify an information source to be used as a suggestion for the fill-in of a text field. In this way, the user can type only the initial letters of the word or of the value to be inserted in the field. The Web application shows different options from which the user can ...
The Domain Model Utility Component is available starting from the WebRatio 5.1 version.
It's a hybrid unit, which means that it can be placed in every View (Site View, Module Definitions View, Service View).
It permits to retrieve information about entities and relationship of the Domain Model....
The "java.lang.ClassFormatError: Invalid method Code length" error, is an error that you can get generating the layout of your Web Project, it means that you used a template in the Web Project that is too large to be compiled.
Read this article to discover more about how to handle and prevent this ...
The UnsupportedClassVersionError can occurr in a Web Project that uses custom components, such as custom validation rules, servlets or listeners.
All these components are developed using a different project (e.g. a Java project) in which you have to compile the Java classes and create a jar file...
The purpose of this article is to provide the basics to operate with styles in WebRatio. A Style Project contains the layout templates needed to generate the graphical elements of your Web Application; the project includes also the resources used in the templates.
An important aspect of a Web Application is the visual identity it has.
The Visual Identity represents all the graphic widgets that you may want to use in order to make the Web Application good looking and in order to have a great user experience.
Since it's possible to specify a personalized ...
The Layout View lets you organize view components in the page using the 960 Grid System. The 960 Grid System (http://960.gs) is very popular CSS framework for defining page layout and is known for its ease and flexibility. The framework is a set of style sheets with CSS rules. It provides two grids:...
Showing more than one component as a single one is a very common need that may occur while creating the style of a WebRatio Web application.
The first option to achieve this is to use the customization available from the Layout View of the specific page, which offers a wide set of criteria to pla...
The WebRatio variables allow to configure the folder in which the Web Application of a Web Project will be generated when one of the following commands is used: Generate Full Web Project, Generate Selection, Generate Logic Descriptor Only, Generate Layout Pages Only. This articles describe which are...
WebRatio allows the user to define Context Parameters and to add Variables, these model elements are used to accomplish different tasks.
Context Parameters are strictly related to session storage, as they save information in the sessionContext and make their content available for all the JSP sessio...
In WebRatio Platform, the state of a component is represented by the Component State Object, a particular data structure that represents the internal state of particular component. This means that each type of component has its particular Component State Object. In its implementation, a Component St...
Content is the most important part of a Web application, and it should be presented in an engaging and professional way to provide the best user experience. Designing, which is the way a specific piece of information must be rendered for the user, is a web designer’s main task when creating a Web ap...
IFML, the modeling language of WebRatio Platform, is built on very few, highly composable concepts, which can be used to assemble complex Web applications for publishing or updating content. The key aspect of IFML is the capability of defining a Web Model consisting of pages, view components, and op...
Thanks to the WebRatio integration in the Eclipse environment, it's possible to easily debug a Web application without leaving the tool.
Usually, debugging a WebRatio generated web application means testing the custom units that have been developed for your specific Web project. The Eclipse Debug...
Validation is used to verify that the data inserted into a form by the user complies with the application domain’s requirements. WebRatio Platform includes several predefined types of Validation Rules that cover the most common validation cases. But sometimes, depending on the scope of the Web appli...
The deploy functionality is related to the process of installing your Web Application
on a local/remote machine, or even in the cloud. Deployment is configured in
WebRatio through the Deploy Configurations dialog which allows you to specify all
the deploy settings (e.g. the application to dep...
The Mail Operation permits users to send personalized emails to each destination address. The email body can be dynamically computed, replacing placeholders in the defined templates with the real content. The email body can also contains images.
This article explains how you can use images static a...