Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress 4GL Handbook

Reusable components

For one thing, the sample procedure is not easily reusable. If you wanted to build a hundred table maintenance windows that all work much the same way (and that’s a basic part of nearly any real business application), you’d have to set up an assembly line process to create them all. In the end you’d wind up with many procedures that create windows that all look and act more or less the same, but they would all be separate procedures requiring separate maintenance and testing. If you needed to make a change to your design, you’d need to make that change to all these separate procedures, and then retest and redeploy them. This would be a major headache and a source of unreliability in your application.

At the same time, you would undoubtedly want to extend the behavior of these windows far beyond what the simple Customers and Orders window does. You might want a real toolbar, for example, with standard icons and a menu. You might want the browse to perform a lot of additional tasks, such as sorting and column reordering and so forth. You might want other kinds of controls in the window, such as drop-down lists of valid values. If you coded each of these additional features for each window, you’d have a tremendous amount of work on your hands.

So OpenEdge provides a set of standard components that do many of these things for you, which you can use to build many different kinds of application windows, as well as the back-end business logic those windows talk to. You can get to know these Progress SmartObjects™ in other OpenEdge documentation.