Release 10.1A: OpenEdge Development:
Progress Dynamics Basic Development

Introduction – field, field container, and window objects

A Progress Dynamics® framework application is constructed from many individual components, or objects. Some objects are defined at the individual field level. Other application objects are defined at the level of containers of these individual fields. These objects are generally referred to as SmartObjects because the objects consist of not only a definition of fields and their properties, but also a body of standard supporting code that is automatically made a part of each object of a given type. This supporting code provides each object type with a substantial amount of useful behavior, as well as a mechanism for communicating with other objects, using the Progress 4GL’s support for named events. The following objects act as containers for individual fields:

Dynamic SmartDataObject (SDO) — Encapsulates a database query for one or more tables and defines a temp-table of the fields or a subset of the fields in the tables.
Dynamic SmartDataBrowser (Browser) — Creates a Progress frame containing a browse control to allow a user to display, scroll through, and select the records from an SDOs query.
Dynamic SmartDataViewer (Viewer) — A Progress frame, containing fill-ins and other representations of the fields in an individual record from a query, used to display record details and allow record updates.

Still other application objects are containers for these field-grouping objects. Generally, these are Progress SmartWindows™ (windows), and possibly tab folders made up of multiple pages within those windows. A window can contain one or more SDOs, browsers, and viewers that interact to retrieve data from the server, send it to a client session, display it, allow it to be updated, and return those updates to the server for validation and writing to the database. Other supporting SmartObjects used in windows include the Progress SmartToolbar™, which visually represents a toolbar of action buttons and/or a menu with a hierarchy of items; the Progress SmartFolder™, which represents the pages of a multi-page window and supports the selection of a page at a time to work with; and other specialized objects. There are also nonvisual container objects, such as the static or dynamic SmartBusinessObject (SBO), which groups multiple SDOs to define complex transactions and business logic to support them.

This chapter describes how to:

Use the Object Generator tool to build a whole suite of objects at the field container level for your application database.
Edit these objects in the AppBuilder and create additional objects with more specific properties.