Once a page has been set up in FormMaker, we need to generate the page to create the output file for use in the final application. This can be done by clicking the Generate Page link at the top of all the screens, or by selecting the page on the Application Map screen and then clicking the Save link in the Page Details. Alternatively, the Generate Application button will generate all the pages as well as prepare the server-side components represented by the action links and the controllers shown on the Application Map diagram.
Once a page has been generated, the output file (XSL) will be created in the XSL asset pool within XDE.
To be able to easily see how a page will look, FormMaker provides a Preview function that can be used after generating to provide an example of what the page will look like.
This works by generating example HTML for each page using the data provided by the 'Page Display' XML document defined for it. These sample HTML pages are then saved into the webapp
directory for your project so that they can correctly pick up all the needed resources, such as CSS, JavaScript, and image files.
You can use the Preview Page button available at the top of every FormMaker screen to view what this preview looks like at any time. If you make any changes to the page, you will need to perform a generate operation on the page before the preview will reflect these changes.
In order for this to work correctly, there are a couple of settings in the Application Defaults section that tell FormMaker where these directories are located. In most cases you will not need to adjust these values, but for more advanced scenarios (such as using the same webapp resources for multiple projects) they can be changed as needed. The Preview Location box should contain the filesystem location of this webapp
directory, eg {install dir}\design\repository\{workspace}\mvc\{project}\webapp
. The Preview URL box should be used to provide the URL that FormMaker should use to access this web application, eg http://localhost:7070/Preview/{workspace}/mvc/{project}/webapp
.
Deployment
When you are happy that your pages are looking okay in the Preview, you need to deploy the application to see how it actually works when running. FormMaker provides a button at the top of every screen to deploy the application. This deploys all the pages and controller components in your project to the local runtime environment to test and debug using the Test Dashboard discussed elsewhere in the documentation. Once the full application has been deployed at least once, you can make use of the Deploy Page button when you want to quickly test changes to a particular page in the runtime environment. If you have added any additional resources to your page (CSS files, script files, etc) then you will need to do a full application deployment for these to be picked up.
Once you are happy that the project is working correctly, the publication options can be used to package up a version for installing on a production server.
For more details on deployment and publication options, please see the Project Deployment and Publication section elsewhere in the documentation.