2.8 What If It Isn't In The Box

Unfortunately we may not have thought of everything you want. Or had time to build it for you. We certainly won't generate pages with your corporate style, or your company logo on. Your business may well have unique features that require unique solutions, so what do you do?

The answer is, that depends! The J2EE transform is not meant to cover everything, and is amenable to change and enhancement. You should certainly spend a few days changing the look and feel of your pages to get a corporate style you are comfortable with. Don't worry too much if you want to change this later. You can change pretty much any of the transform you want to, or more likely your architect can.

Using JeeWiz means that things you would normally program many times, you can meta-program once. It takes longer to meta-program than to program, so if you need a one-off, you should provide hooks for the application programmer instead. Otherwise you can have a section of meta-programming written which adds to the transform. This can then be accessed in the model probably by a style, possibly by a stereotype or template.

So first you have to decide, is this a one-off or something that will reoccur time and again. Another consideration is that meta-programmers are usually more busy than programmers, so if you aren't sure if this is going to be used several times, it is probably better to stick to using the programmer.

Here's a couple of examples: you need to attach to a legacy database that stores all its dates as character strings in U.S format, MM/DD/YY, even though you are based in France, but there is nothing in the 3.9 box to deal with this. As there may be several date fields in the database and this may not be the only application you want to create to access this database, you should ask the architect to create you a new piece of code (which will be modified from existing code) and accessed as a dbStyle on the attribute. You need to show a page listing how many staff are on holiday on each day in a particular month and the holiday bookings for an individual for the same period, so the user can compare the two and see whether it is reasonable to authorise leave. This is a complex page style, unlikely to occur again, so you would be better off modeling the calendar grid structures (perhaps five rows, seven columns) as dataviews with no initial entity, and using programming to fill and process them.

One exception to the do-it-by-programming-for-the-one-off rule is when you need fine control of a particular page. An architect can write a template for you that displays the page as exactly as the final language (html/jsp) will allow. This is discussed in the section How to Make the Screens Look Different.

If you need alterations to the transform and you don't have the expertise in house, ask NT/e.

To access a new property or style in RSA the architect might need to alter the filter and update the .epx file that holds the stereotypes and properties list. A short term fix, is given by the extraAttributes property, which allows you to specify properties that are not in the stereotype. It can carry multiple property/value pairs. One property value pair is specified in "property=value" format, with multiple pairs separated by strings.

For example: sizeStyle=big,colorStyle=mocha

The '=', ',' and '\' characters are special in this syntax, so if you want to specify them in the value, you must escape them with a preceding '\'.

For example:
backslash=\\
comma=\,

The names of extraAttribute properties must not conflict with any other attribute names or a generate-time error will arise.

• How to Make the Screens Look Different

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