Building pages

A DomUI application is a set of pages, each of them a Java class. This section describes the page model itself: what a page is, how its state and lifetime are managed, how it is addressed in an URL, and how it is translated.

• Building your first page - what a page is, how its class name becomes an URL, and what createContent() does, in three small examples.
• Using components - what a component is, the state every input control has, how getValue() reports bad input and how a control reports a change.
• Using databases - QCriteria as the question and QDataContext as the thing that runs it, restrictions and combinators, and querying over a relation.
• Typed properties - replacing the property strings in a query with generated, compile-time checked ones.
• Data binding - letting a control and a model property follow each other, which way each kind of binding moves, and what bindErrors() is for.
• Page navigation - what a page keeps between requests, how UIGoto moves to another one, and the shelf of pages that the breadcrumb is made of.
• Showing rows - the model, the RowRenderer and the DataTable, a search screen built on a SearchPanel, and why a list re-queries when you come back to it.
• Metadata - saying once, on the class, what every screen showing it needs to know: labels, limits, presentation - and translating all of it through DomUI's own resource bundles.
• Telling something to a user - the message box, the message that stays on the page, the exception dialog, and the error fence that decides where a message is shown.
• Layout - the panel a page's content sits in, the bar its buttons sit on, tabs - and how to make a piece of screen of your own that several pages can use.
• Writing a component - a component is a class implementing IControl; what AbstractDivControl already does, when a control decides its value changed, and why bindValue is not value.