First Steps
What's next: first steps after creating a new workbench web
02 May 2019 - 19:27
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Version 1
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UnknownUser
How to proceed
Each application has a master topic located in the application's subweb, which captures all information and
documentation for this application. This is is a topic of type
WikiApplication. Create it and give it the
same name as your newly created application web. For example given you created a new web
MyNewApp
then create a new
WikiApplication topic
MyNewApp. That's where application-level
documentation goes. All topic-level documentation is done within the
ApplicationTopics themselves. In addition of
being an
ApplicationTopic these are tagged
DocuTopic and contain a named section "docu". The
WikiApplication
topic contains a control function that gathers all topic-level documentation by extracting the section "docu" from
DocuTopics.
Model
When starting to write a new
WikiApplication, you may proceed by creating new
TopicTypes, that are specific
for it.
TopicTypes will define the data model, and optionally an installer and a factory that help in deploying and
creating a new topic of the new type.
Now create a few instances of the new
TopicType. For now, it only has a plain text and probably a
DataForm attached
to it. The
TopicTypes are used to create a topic of that type, together with an optional
TopicTemplate as a blueprint.
This blueprint shall have all the specific means pre-installed that are needed
to properly display a topic of that type.
View
After you created the data model and a few topic instances of that type, you can start writing
TopicFunctions to control this data. For example create a
RenderMyNewTopicType that displays the data
of one topic. Now create a
TopicView that includes a call to this new
TopicFunction. Then apply the
TopicView to
a topic by setting its VIEW_TEMPLATE property. Add this setting to the
TopicTemplate so that each newly authored
topic of that type will have the correct view applied to it.
Control
When you finished implementing the data model and the view you may proceed by creating reports and queries to
list a set of topics of that type and display the appropriately.
The further alley your application takes is very dependent on the kind of application you are about to implement.
Deployment
Finally, you will need a way to deploy the application into another web. This is done by either implementing an web template
containing the blueprint of a complete web with all functions already installed. You may then deploy an instance of the application
by creating a new web on this base.
Alternatively, the application can be added to an already
existing web by installing the relevant
TopicTypes into the target web. This is done by using the installers on the
TopicTypes and
WebTools each.
If you add an application to an already existing web for the first time, you may also need to create the basic infrastructure
of
TopicTypes by deploying the
TopicType "TopicType" and "TopicStub" into the target web.
Documentation
Each part of your application can come with its own documentation. Mark it to be of type
DocuTopic so that its documentation
will be extracted automatically in the master topic. For example each topic of type
TopicType is also of type
DocuTopic by default.
Create pure
DocuTopics that describe overall documentation about your application.
Last not least delete this text and replace it with a meaningful description and introduction to your application.