Get started with Omnis Studio

Using forms
14 Another extremely useful feature in Omnis Studio is the form creator module. Omnis can guide you through this part using carefully defined steps. To begin, select the project you are working on in the left pane of the Studio Browser. On the right pane you will see several options, one of which is ‘Class Wizard’. Click on that option.

15 Now follow the steps and select the options you want to use to create your form. The wizard allows you to create windows, reports, search modules and other things. Once you run through the options, you will be taken to a screen like the one in the screenshot below, where you can edit the appearance of this module.

16 If you want to customise the form a bit more, you can go back to the project library and right-click on the Class icon. You will see several options here which allow you to customise your class. You can edit the methods used by it or you can edit its appearance. Just about every part of your application is available to you, in code as well as to edit graphically.

17 Now that you have a form and a database for your application, it’s time to attach a database query to connect these two components together. Select the project icon and create a new class of type Query. Pick a name for it and then double-click on its icon to open it in the Query Editor. The editor allows you to drag and drop elements from the DB schema into the Query window to create queries.

18 Although Omnis Studio is a great RAD and has several very useful tools that allow you to create most of the desired elements in your web application, there are times when you’ll want to hand-code a part of it, or edit what has been automatically generated by Omnis Studio. That’s when you open the file containing the element’s code in the Omnis IDE. To do so, right-click on the file and click on the Methods option. This will open the file in the code editor.

Test your application
19 Once you have got some bits and pieces of your application up and running, you can begin testing individual modules. For example, once you have the front end and the back end of a form window sorted out, you can test it out. To do so, click on the Class icon for the form and then hit the key combination, Ctrl+T. You should now see a functional version of your window pop up.

Omnis Studio is a great Rapid Application Development platform. It can be particularly useful to generate quick prototypes of your applications. The interface of the platform is simple, yet it is packed with all the features needed to build a 21st Century web application.

This article originally appeared in issue 84 of Linux User & Developer magazine.

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