OpenEdge Development:<br />Progress Dynamics Advanced Development Writing Super Procedures for Progress Dynamics Objects

A basic principle of the Progress Dynamics® framework is to create an application from mostly dynamic, or data-driven components. In OpenEdge Development: Progress Dynamics Basic Development , you can see how to generate dynamic Browsers and Viewers, and how to assemble these into dynamic Windows with Folders and dynamic Toolbars.

A major goal of providing all these dynamic objects is to minimize the amount of code in your application that you need to write, maintain, and deploy. This leaves open the question of where you do put code when you have to write it. And of course you do have to write code of many kinds to complete any application. The Progress Dynamics framework provides most of the default behavior you need, but not application-specific business logic.

The discussion of the SDO logic procedure in OpenEdge Development: Progress Dynamics Basic Development answers the question for the SDO: in order to free most SDOs from static code and to be dynamic objects, you should write business logic and validation logic in a separate procedure that is run along with your dynamic SDO instance, and made a super procedure of the SDO.

The same technique applies to other dynamic objects as well. If you have dynamic Viewers and Browsers in your client user interface and they need to respond to events with custom code, you can put that code into a separate procedure, which you designate as the custom super procedure for the object. At run time, the super procedure is run along with the instance of the dynamic object, and it responds to events in the object by running custom code.

This chapter describes how to create custom super procedures for dynamic client-side objects and what kind of code you should consider putting into them (and not putting into them), and suggests a programming style and introduces an API that together simplify the code you write. It also discusses dynamic user interface events, as well as how to anticipate providing your application with a Web browser user interface in Progress Dynamics Version 2. This chapter includes the following topics:

Client-side code

Using custom super procedures in Progress Dynamics

Defining a custom super procedure for an object

Writing code for a custom super procedure

Defining user interface events in Progress Dynamics

Moving client logic support to an extended class

Running a PLIP from client logic

Building a custom super procedure for a browser

Using the client logic API

Organizing logic at the level of procedures or functions

Customizing dynamic lookup behavior in viewers