This is Chapter 16. If you want to go back to the beginning, you can find it here: Chapter 1. Or go back to Chapter 15.
Video 16: Reworking the Main Menu
To make your experience smooth, we set the main tags mentioned in the video to the right bar menu of this mini-player. Choose an interesting subtitle on the list and immediately get to the exact theme navigation item place in the video. Now you can pick any topic to be instructed on without watching the whole video.
Chapter 16: Cleaning and Sorting the Main Menu
Consider the lifecycle of the Car. It is created in the Factory and then sold to a CarDealer. We clean up the Main menu and move "New Car" into new views for CarFactory.
493. Let’s start cleaning up items.
- Delete the yellow note.
- Go to the Actions editor to sort the main menu items into menu groups.
- Move CarSeeker, ShowCarsAndBrands, and ShowCarsAndBrandsSVG finto the “Views” menu group.
- Move BrandSeeker into the “Admin” menu group.
- Move PersonSeekerIAmInControl into the “Views” menu group. Save.
494. Delete the second PersonSeeker action (PersonSeekerAgain).
495. Open Cloudform and make sure your servers are running.
496. Check if there are changes when you upload the model. If there are none, go back to the model and save.
497. Upload the model to ensure the Turnkey Server sees your menu changes.
498. Understand why CarSeeker requires a login - find the reference to the access group.
499. Understand the difference between having the access group on the action vs. having it on the view in the context of the discussion in the video regarding deep links.
500. Create a new car and verify everything works. Get a registration number fairly quickly after saving.
501. Create a new CarFactorySeeker and set its class to CarFactory. Use the UI-first and click on Copy Seeker Autoform to get a suggestion quickly.
502. Clean up the columns you don't want in the Seeker result.
- Delete the “AsString”, “ChangeTime”, “CreateTime”, and “Guid” attributes.
- Leave the “Name” attribute.
503. Add the Global action that shows the CarFactorySeeker to the “Views” menu group. The action was created by the "Copy Seeker Autoform" UI-first function.
504. Create a ViewModel action called CreateFactory and set its expression to CarFactory.Create
505. Follow the video and update the expression with a "let" construct to also give a name to the new factory. Write:
let f=CarFacory.Create in ( f.Name:'NewFactory'
)
506. Save and upload the model. Verify the CarFactorySeeker shows.
- Click on Create Factory to add a NewFactory and save.
507. In the ViewModel editor, add a new Class action called ShowFactory. This action should bring a Document form showing a specific factory.
508. Add a new CarFactoryView ViewModel. Set its class to CarFactory and tick the checkbox on the ViewModel - it requires a root.
509. Back to the action ShowFactory - set Bring Up ViewModel to CarFactoryView and set the ViewModel RootObject to self. Save.
510. Back to the CarFactoryView ViewModel, click on UI-First and select Copy Document Auto Form.
511. Clean up the view to remove things we don't want by following the video.
512. Understand the different ways to remove ViewModel columns and widgets.
513. Check the actions on the CarSeeker ViewModel. Follow along with the video and delete the NewCar action from this view.
514. In the CarFactoryView, add a ViewModel action for NewCar.
515. In the Execute expression, create a new car. Use a let construct and set the CarOwner to the current factory. Write and save:
let c=Car.Create in ( c.CarOwner:=vCurrent_CarFactoryView
)
516. Clean up the columns in CurrentlyOwnedCars as shown in the video.
- Delete the “AsString”, “ChangeTime”, “CreateTime”, and “Guid” attributes.
- Leave the “RegistrationNumber” and “State” attributes.
517. Save and upload the model.
518. Verify that the CarFactorySeeker brings up the CarFactoryView for the selected CarFactory.
519. Test the NewCar action and save. Verify that you get a new registration number.
520. A factory is tied to a specific brand - but our model does not yet reflect this fact.
521. In the main class diagram, create a new association between CarFactory and BrandOfCar.
The CarFactory has 0..1 BrandOfCar and the BrandOfCar has 0 to many (0..*) CarFactories (there can be many BMW factories, but a BMW factory can only make one brand of cars - BMW).
- Right-click on Car and search for “Changed by – Cross Reference”.
- Select “VMAction:CarFactoryView:NewCar
522. Now, amend the NewCar action in the CarFactoryView to also assign the BrandOfCar for the created car to the value of BrandOfCar on the factory. In the Execute Expression box, write:
let c=Car.Create in ( c.CarOwner:=vCurrent_CarFactoryView
c.BrandOfCar:=vCurrent_CarFactoryView.BrandOfCar)
Click “Ok” and save.
523. In the CarFactoryView ViewModel, we also want to set what BrandOfCar this factory produces.
- Right-click to add a ComboBox (Singlelinks with setter) that lists all BrandOfCar(s) and assigns to the CarFactory a BrandOfCar single association.
- Drag the BrandOfCar widget into place on the grid.
524. Save the model and go to the Cloud dialog. Click the "Changes" button. Now, we should see that the DB schema must be updated to reflect the new foreign key in CarFactory to hold the BrandOfCar key.
525. Upload the model. Verify that the database has been evolved by "Check Server Status".
526. In the CarFactory's list of cars, add the column to show the BrandOfCar.
- Go to CarFactoryView Viewmodel, scroll down to CurrentlyOwnedCars, and right-click. Choose “Add column”, select “BrandOfCar”, then “BrandOfCar.Name : String”.
- Edit the display name to show as “Brand”.
- Save and check your app.
527. In the video, I mistakenly deleted the factory - this was due to the action "Delete This" being close to the "New Car" so I assumed that the delete was for the car - but it was for the factory.
- Return to the Car FactoryView ViewModel and double-click on “Delete This” in the actions.
- Give the "Delete this" action a better name like "Delete This Factory". Save and check the web.
- Note the changes are not showing. Go to the Cloud dialog and upload the model. Check the app again.
528. Find the CarFactoryView's action ShowFactory and follow the discussion in the video on why this is worthless here - but necessary in other places - and do an opt-out in this position to clean the options up a bit.
529. Create a few (5) new cars in the app. Save with them getting unique registration numbers.
530. Since the factory creates cars, it will not actually purchase any cars, so we can remove the "DocumentForSales" grid and the controls that belong to it from the view.
- Save and upload the model.
- Follow the discussion on why InitiateSale is not possible at this time.
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