Code On Time: Code Generator

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Code Generator

Thursday, December 30, 2010Print Subscribe

User feedback has brought about further enhancements to the Web App Factory code generator project for ASP.NET/AJAX available with Code On Time generator.

Code generation of a Web App Factory project will now conclude with an automatic rebuild of the solution.
If the solution has been rebuilt successfully then the project home page will be loaded in the default web browser.
If the solution has failed to compile then Visual Studio/Visual Web Developer Express will be started. The project will be automatically rebuild to show the error messages in IDE of your development tool.
Similar sequence of “rebuild and start a browser if success” or “rebuild and show Visual Studio if failure” is executed when user selects browse action next to the project name on the start page of the code generator.

The change will significantly simplify development when code formulas, code expressions, and custom code is incorporated in the project. If an error is introduced then there will be no way of missing the problem thanks to the latest enhancements.

Web App Factory projects are implemented as a solution with a class library and web application project. Changes to themes, new code files, changes in the target .NET Framework of the project, and other such modifications may result in erroneous references in the solution and project files.

The code generator will frequently try to preserve the previous changes making an assumption that user will take care of correcting any inconsistencies. The effort is made to pick up any new files in the project folders to update the solution projects. If you are well under way in your development process then there should be few situations when such updating of the project files will cause problems. The new compilation mode will automate the detection of problems and will not mask them by launching the website with the last known “good” build of the application, which was happening in the previous releases of the code generator.

If you would like to try various features of the code generator then a sample Web Site Factory project may be a better choice than Web App Factory project. Web Site Factory projects do not require a project file and are easily handling changes to the project configuration.

We recommend creating Web Site Factory projects unless a solution with web application project is requirement. Both, Web Site Factory and Web App Factory produce functionally identical web applications.

Bug Fixes

Several fixes were introduced to correct the following issues:

Business Objects were generated with compilation errors when the first field of the primary key is string and the number of fields in the corresponding table was less or equal to four.
Symbol “single quote” in navigation menu title or description was causing the runtime error which led to the failure of the page to render correctly.
Auto Complete lookup style has been failing to render when lookup field has the type of “String” and there is no alias field.
Web App Factory projects failed to compile when a dedicated login page has been enabled.
User Name and User ID lookup styles were not working.
“Read Roles” defined on a field level in Designer Spreadsheet were not transferred to the baseline application .
Lookup details were not working with Web App Factory projects.

Web App Factory projects can be deployed to Windows 2008 servers without any known issues.

Labels: Application Factory, Code Generator, Release Notes

Thursday, December 30, 2010Print Subscribe

Installation Issues

Code On Time generator is a Windows application that hosts an Internet Explorer web browser within the boundaries of the main window. The code generator navigates to the HTML files stored locally on the hard drive of your computer. HTML files provide interactive user interface of the code generator based on JavaScript. No information is transmitted over the web to our server when you generate your applications. The input and output files of the code generator are stored entirely on your computer.

In a few instances there were reports of the code generator displaying a blank page with Code On Time logo at the top when the generator starts. No other user interface elements were present. Re-installation of the code generator would not help.

The issue has to do with the security settings of Internet Explorer.

Background

Internet Explorer allows controlling if execution of the JavaScript embedded into HTML pages is allowed.

The computer has five security zones, namely:

(0) Local Machine zone,
(1) Internet,
(2) Local intranet,
(3) Trusted sites, and
(4) Restricted sites.

However the Internet Explorer user interface allows users to configure only 4 of the 5 security zones using the Internet Explorer interface.

The Local Machine zone (0), is an implicit zone that exists on the local computer, security settings for this zone cannot be configured using the Internet Options Control Panel.

Any configuration done from the Internet Explorer interface have absolutely no effect on enabling scripts to run within Windows Applications on the local computer (a matter which also affects Code On Time code generator).

Steps to Reproduce

If you save the emphasized text below to the file named "Steps to reproduce.reg" and double-click the file to add the file entries to the registry then the script execution in the Local Machine Zone will become disabled. DO NOT DO THAT !!! Winking smile

REGEDIT4

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0]

"1200"=dword:00000000
"1201"=dword:00000001
"1400"=dword:00000000
"1406"=dword:00000000
"1C00"=hex:00,00,02,00

[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]

"Security_HKLM_only"=dword:00000001

Steps to Rectify

If you save the emphasized text presented below to the file "Script Permissions Fix.reg" and double-click the file to add the file entries to the registry then the script execution in the Local Machine Zone will be allowed. Code On Time generator will start functioning correctly.

REGEDIT4
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings\Zones\0]
"1400"=dword:00000003
[HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Policies\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Internet Settings]
"Security_HKLM_only"=dword:00000001

References

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/833633

This information has been provided courtesy of Gabriel Inya-Agha of Quickening Group.

Labels: Code Generator, Installation, Tips and Tricks

Monday, December 27, 2010Print Subscribe

Web App Factory, Multiple Value Filters, …

The latest release of Code On Time generator introduces several bug fixes and new major features.

Advanced Filters and Search Bar options have been enhanced to allow adaptive filtering with multiple values. The screenshot below shows the new “include” search bar option that allows selecting multiple values to filter a column.

Multiple value filter can be activated from the context menu of the column header. The context menu with the highlighted filter option is shown in the picture.
Web App Factory project now supports ASP.NET 4.0 and ASP.NET 3.5. Projects of this type are generated as a Visual Studio solution with the core application and data controllers placed in a separate class library and application pages hosted in a separate Web Application project. A bare-bones Sandbox project is also included to provide a starting point for developers looking to integrate the core application in their own projects.

The new release will produce applications with EnableCdn property of the ScriptManager set to “False” by default to prevent errors during development without Internet connection.

Rich Editor is now provided with a dedicated host page that prevents a runtime error in Windows 2008 deployments.

Web App Factory provides additional entries that will ensure application operating without errors in Windows 2008 instances of IIS 7 with the new pipeline mode.

Business Objects now support an advanced version of Select and SelectSingle methods that will allow to use filter expressions to be executed against the database.

Coming Soon

The next release of the code generator will include new Chart and Pivot views. Stay tuned.

Labels: Code Generator, Release Notes