MODULESTUDIO

We are happy to release the new MOST version 0.5.1 which fixes numerous bugs. Beside these corrections also several new functions have been integrated.

In the editors there is a small change: performance of live validation has been improved by closing a memory leak.

Apart from that the focus for this version was the generator. Here the enhancements of generator and modeling language in detail:

Many bugfixes

This release contains many corrections, especially for handling relations with Doctrine.

Factories for business entities and collections

For each application a factory class is generated now, with which instantiation of new business objects is reduced to one line of code. This factory receives also the context from which the object has been asked for. For example this can be an action, a form handler or also a content type. Therewith it is possible to use different business classes depending on the context in specialisations of this factory class.

Improved handling of user fields

If one has user fields in an entity, editing these fields is now done with an auto complete function in the forms.

Handling upload fields with different possible settings in the Model

You can now model different settings for upload fields, for example the allowed file extensions, the name of the subfolder storing the files or the scheme for naming uploaded files. The generator creates a complete upload handling from that, for images including support for the Thumbnail Module.

Managing relations

The handling of relations has been overhauled completely, particularly in the edit forms. When editing an entity it is possible to choose, reference and manage (inline editing) other objects with auto complete fields. Each relation has a new property called "edit type" on modeling level. With that one can define on which side of the relation which actions should be possible.

Improved ajax support

Beside the Zikula.ImageViewer also the Zikula.UI library is used. When displaying and editing objects referenced objects are edited or embedded with it.

Direct validation

When editing entities also client-side validation with validation.js is supported for some field types.

Description of elements

Each model element has a new field for functional documentation. In the main generator this information is only used for the application itself (module description), entities (description text at the top of list views) and their fields (Zikula.UI tooltips for labels in edit forms) at the moment.

As an example for how a generated application "feels" like we provided a small test module. It consists of four tables and shows just a few basic functions (and not for example inheritance or Doctrine behaviors). The module contains customers which may each have an address (1:1) and multiple orders (1:n). Every order references many products (m:n).

To give this module a try (and also all other ones creates with MOST 0.5.1) install the newest development version of Zikula 1.3 first. Ideally also the Thumbnail module is added, but this is not required.

One special thank you goes to Roland Bär (planetenkiller), who contributed many useful bug reports and Doctrine-related tipps to this release.

We wish you happy testing and are looking forward to your feedback. Important: do not use the generated applications in production environments yet. There are still many bugs to find and the 1.3 code may change, so better use this version of ModuleStudio for playing around and getting familiar with the Model-Driven way of building Zikula applications.

SimpleTest_051.zip