Characteristics

The program was developed as an open system of the creation of DB-applications, but only DB-forms applications are fully implemented yet. It is a CASE-tool for the databases area. In contrast to existing systems the production of the forms was understood as a multi-level process. The principal reason for the bad quality of the automatically created forms, with conventional system, is the use of the relational schema (data dictionary) as a source of information for form generator. Then such forms must be adapted manually. Relational schema (table structure) contains only few information about the semantics of the data. It are simple too few information for creating good forms. With Xdobry the production of the forms are made in three steps

  1. Exact specification the DB-schema on the step of the conceptual model, use of reverse engineering technology. User DB-administrator

  2. Automatic production of the forms. Adaptation of the appearance in the GUI-editor. User DB-application developer

  3. Use of the DB-forms for the treatment of the data. End user

In this way man can produce quickly and hight quality DB-form. The forms are in this system more a representation of objects then tables.

  1. The relationship among the objects are used to build a link-navigation for browsing the data domain. The form can be used like hypertext documents (hyper forms). One can discover the objects association (relationship) without the knowledge about data structure.

  2. The forms support hight level abstraction as aggregation or heritage. This is performed as nested forms.

  3. The complex modeling concepts like foreign-keys are hidden from user. The system handles the user friendly display of foreign keys and check the integrity.

For every step a separated program is responsible which was developed for other target user group:

  1. SchemaEditor

  2. FormEditor, form generator and GUI-Drag and drop editor

  3. FormServer

Xdobry It was developed as a part of a dissertation. It is still , extended and modified