Starting the AppBuilder
To bring up the AppBuilder, you need to close down the Procedure Editor if it’s running, then select the AppBuilder icon on the OpenEdge Desktop, as shown in Figure 4–1.
Alternately, you can bring up the AppBuilder directly from the Windows desktop, by selecting the AppBuilder menu option under the OpenEdge startup group.
The AppBuilder main window has its own menu and toolbar, as shown in Figure 4–2.
In addition, the AppBuilder has a separate Palette window where you can select various kinds of both visual objects and nonvisual data management objects to add to your application. You’ll look at just a few of these objects in this chapter. You can learn all about the AppBuilder in OpenEdge Development: AppBuilder .
Figure 4–3 shows the icons for the Palette objects you’ll be using in this chapter. You can learn some of the others by floating the mouse over an icon and looking at its tooltip.
You can reshape and reposition the Palette window as you like. To save the Palette window’s position, select Menu
Options Save Palette from the Palette window.
In addition to the Palette window, the Pro*Tools window also comes up when you start the AppBuilder.
In this chapter you’ll build a window that displays some fields from the Customer table, as well as a browse that shows the Orders for the current Customer. So this is like the example you built in the first chapter, except for two differences:
- By choosing graphical objects to build your window, you get a much better interface than you got using the defaults provided by the
DISPLAYstatement in the previous chapters, one that looks more like a real application window. - Because the AppBuilder generates most of the supporting 4GL code for you, you actually have to write even less code than you did in previous chapters.