Home panel

The home panel is the first tab of the interface. You cannot close it.

It shows the list of persistence units that the user can manage.

A persistence unit is the combination of the object data model and the actual data (i.e. the connection to the database).

Click on one element of the list to access to all the available actions for the corresponding persistence unit.

Toolbar

The toolbar provides shortcut for performing actions on the current persistence unit: look for objects, create new instances, perform queries, call methods from the logic layer, etc.

Persistence unit panel

After selecting a persistence unit on the home panel, you are redirected to a panel that offers you basically all the actions that you can perform from the toolbar, with further explanations.

Lists of objects

A screen that users will often encounter is the one that displays lists of objects (usually called list view).

This view is very similar to classic relational administration tools although in Objectwiz clicking on a row will most of the time lead the user to the graph view where it is possible to interactively navigate the object graph (see below).

The object graph

Objectwiz will most of the time redirect to this view when the user selects an object.

This view shows the current object in the middle of the screen and the connected objects on the surrounding ellipse.

This graph is customizable (see related section): on the screenshot above it is possible to see the picture because the following HTML template has been set:

<div style="height: 150px";>

<b>#{title}</b> ($#{price})<br/>

<img src="#{imageURL}" alt="Image" />

</div>

Without this template, the central node would look like:

Moving the mouse over the central node will expand it and make action icons available. Using these icons, it is possible to manipulate the object (edit it, call a method from the business logic with this object as one of the parameters, etc.). Leave the mouse over an action icon for a few seconds to get a tooltip explaining its effect.

Last but not least, this graph is interactive since clicking on one object on the ellipse will make it become the current object (= the central object). On the previous screenshot, clicking on Feature Film-drama will lead to the next screenshot.

NOTE: If the data model contains unidirectional associations, Objectwiz automatically generates the opposite property for the purpose of browsing the graph. The link from films to categories in the DVD Store is an example of unidirectional association: categories do not have an attribute that references all the corresponding films but it is automatically generated (see above screenshot where the label was customized for clarity).