Difference between revisions of "UBIK Studio Basics"

Revision as of 15:16, 2 May 2016

UBIK^® Studio is the server application and administrative tool for creating and modifying UBIK^® object models. It enables you to transfer your entity-relationship-model into UBIK^® MetaClasses and MetaProperties and build up necessary relations. It is also the instrument of choice to manage instances of MetaClasses, edit their property values and create views and queries. This section will provide you with more information on the user interface.

UBIK^® Studio

Prerequisites

Command line arguments

The following arguments can be passed to and will be recognized by the UBIK.Studio.exe:

Setting these command line arguments might changes the expected behavior of a data model significantly!

Options

UBIK^® Studio settings

Locate and click the menu File → Options. Press Apply or OK when you're finished changing the options, or Cancel if you don't want your changes to be saved. The settings are user-specific and will be stored in your local Windows user profile.

In the options you can configure your database connection by the following parameters

Take care that the specified SQL user has appropriate permissions on the database.

Additional options are

Database specific settings

Once successfully connected to a database, the menu item Database → {database name} settings... becomes visible. As the name already states, these are settings that are specific to the very database you are connected to, hence changes also only apply to it.

The following parameters can be read, respectively edited here

Working with UBIK^® Studio

Basic UI elements

Menu and toolbar

The top area of UBIK^® Studio features a menu strip:

Status strip

The very bottom of the UBIK^® Studio window displays a status strip, providing the following information, from left to right:

Status Notification

UBIK^® Studio status notification

UBIK^® Studio informs the user about important events happening within the UBIK system.Therefore the Status strip has a notification area on the right showing a yellow notification icon once there has occured an event the user should be aware of. These events are warning and error messages or also a reminder from the UBIK^® Customizing Control to rebuild changed customizing code in order to provide the expected system behaviour. If there is a certain action involved to handle this notification, it is possible to get there immediately (e.g. open the Event Tracer window to review a warning) by clicking on the notification icon itself.

Working area and controls

UBIK^® Studio main window

The main window of UBIK^® Studio is split into 3 sections, where each of the 3 areas can hold an arbitrary amount of controls. The arrangement of the controls is user specific and can be saved in the user's profile. In addition to the predefined sections, the user interface can be extended with working windows, where each working window can again hold any amount of controls:

View → New Working Window or Ctrl+W

However, such working windows are considered temporary and are therefore not made persistent when the layout is saved.

Using and connecting controls

Each control provides different functionality for object creation/modification. Clicking the header of an empty tab strip in one of these areas with the left mouse button will bring up a context menu, that allows you to create a new tab page hosting one of the following controls:

UBIK^® Studio controls

Control	Preview	Purpose
Class Browser		Navigate through, create and delete MetaClasses and instances
Class Details		Design MetaClasses in their details; add/remove MetaProperties and classifications
Bulk Editor		Create and edit multiple instances of a MetaClass in table style
Code Editor		Implement MetaClass specific functionality using C#
Relation Editor		Relate objects to each others and edit relational data
Object Explorer		Display and edit all exposed properties of objects (list style)
Object Editor		Edit the property values of a single object
Workflow Editor		View, design and run customer specific workflows

All controls in the UBIK^® working area offer the following interaction functionality:

• Set a control as ListenTo source of another control by dragging an object from the source control and drop it on the header of the hosting tab of the target control
• Release ListenTo by clicking the respective header and selecting the ListenTo: control name menu item
• Reconnect to the last known ListenTo source (if applicable) by selecting the Reconnect to: menu item
• Close a control by right clicking the tab header and selecting the Close menu item.

Drag&Drop with the right mouse button to only set the context object of a control, without connecting ListenTo

Drag&Drop an object at an empty tab strip will let you select the control afterwards and subsequently sets the context object

User rights

As of now, UBIK^® Studio doesn't feature a real user management system for designing data models. Although there is a distinction made between an admin and a non-admin user, with the very purpose of protecting system objects against unintended manipulation.

However, UBIK^® fetches the current Windows user and creates the environment with this credentials, storing the login information on a Session object.

Admin mode

Admin mode

Right click on the user name in the status strip and select the menu item Admin mode to switch all active controls to Admin mode. As long as you are in admin mode, the user name in the status strip will appear red.

Be careful, manipulating system objects might results in instability of UBIK® Studio or other UBIK® components!

See also

• Studio controls
• How to install UBIK Studio