Tour Sections

• Introduction
• Site Structure
• Page Assembly
• URL Handlers
• Multi-View Strings
• Authentication
• Database
• Error Handling
• Validation
• Config Data
• Logging
• EDP
• User Interface
• Formatters
• Images
• API Utilities
• Developer Tools

ToolKit Description

Event Driven Pages (EDP)

New with pageblocks 3.1 is an MVC framework called Event Driven Pages. EDP is a collection of abstract custom types and code standards which automate user interface generation and response handling for data entry pages. EDP is built upon existing services in the pageblocks framework, so it works within the existing page assembly engine not a replacement for it.

EDP is intended for use with multi-form workflow processes--a sequence of forms which are sequentially or randomly completed with each form a component of a larger data set that must be completed as a whole. For example, a registration process which might use separate forms to collect contact information, billing information, membership profile, and application preferences. Rather than presenting this to the user a single lengthy form, it can be divided into topical areas without a commitment to complete the entire data set at one time. Another example could be product configuration which requires that a sequence of forms be completed in a specific order with the second form being dependent on the first form, etc.

EDP not only standardizes the structure of essential page components, but also the workflow processes and automates the the form and datasource interfacing. EDP consists of abstract custom types to subclass for app-specific purposes. Several dozen process steps are automated, but can be overloaded on a form-by-form basis when needed. EDP significantly reduces the amount code the developer has to write to build typical data editing applications, and provides a rich structure for keeping things well organized and and more reliable. (This site doesn't yet have much info on EDP, but more will be added soon.)

For each page of the EDP module, the basic workflow controlled by the EDP framework is to first submit the form of the previous page, then to prepare the form to be displayed on the response page (which can be dynamically determined). With each submit, the event is detected (i.e. which button was clicked), and if a database add, update, or delete needs to take place, that is automatically triggered. Single table data is all automated, and for complex actions, a simple tag in the form's model custom type can be overloaded. The workflow automates the processing of validation, business rules, and post-process code.

A larger view of this image is available here.

With all the structural definitions, the actual user interface is up to the developer. Here are two examples (they happen to be similar with the top navigation menu, but even layout features that like are flexible).