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Introduction to WebObjects Direct to Web Guide

Contents:

Organization of This Document

The Direct to Web framework is a configurable system for creating WebObjects applications that access a database. All Direct to Web needs to create the application is a model for the database, which you can build using EOModeler.

This application is not a set of static web pages. Instead, Direct to Web uses information from the model at runtime to dynamically generate the pages. Consequently, you can modify your application’s configuration at runtime using the Direct to Web Assistant (WebAssistant for short). You can hide entities, hide their properties, reorder the properties, and change the way they are displayed without recompiling or relaunching the application.

Organization of This Document

This book provides an introduction to Direct to Web and then describes the concepts you’ll need to know when you customize a Direct to Web application.

To help you find what you are looking for, this book is divided into three remaining chapters:

“An Introduction to Direct To Web” shows how to build a Direct to Web project and perform simple customization tasks on it.

“Direct to Web Architecture” describes the components and classes involved in generating Direct to Web pages.

“Customizing a Direct to Web Application” discusses several ways to customize the behavior of a Direct to Web application and presents three full examples:

• a property-level component that edits dates using pop-up lists

• a new task page called an edit-list page that edits several objects at a time.

• adding authentication to a Direct to Web application.

The first topic is suitable for a WebObjects beginner. The last two topics are intended for a programmer who is already familiar with WebObjects, specifically entity-relationship modeling and the WebObjects request-response cycle. For more information about entity-relationship modeling, see WebObjects Enterprise Objects Programming Guide. For more information about the WebObjects request-response cycle, see WebObjects Web Applications Programming Guide.

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