The upcoming release of VisionX will support CSS styling. We'll show you a first impression with a short video:

The editor supports autocompletion and syntax highlighting:

VisionX CSS Editor

We did integrat the RSyntaxTextArea for this. If you want to know how this works, check the documentation.

Transactions are an integral mechanism of databases, without them we could hardly ensure data consistency. Well, we could of course, but it would be a lot more work. JDBC has of course support for transactions, but it also supports so called "Savepoints", which we will have a look at today.

What are transactions?

Normally, I'd assume that everyone of you knows what transactions are and what they are used for, but today I will quickly rehash it to make sure. Transactions enable us to define groups of statements to be executed on a database with all either succeeding or all failing. Imagine the following statements which might be executed on a database as one action:

1: Insert record into A
2: Update record of B
3: Update another record of B
4: Insert record into C

This might happen in the background if you click a button or do something similar. This example is straightforward but if we start thinking about possible problems we will soon realize that there is a lot of potential for things going wrong. For example if statement #3 would fail we would miss records in the tables B and C. Overall, our data would be in an inconsistent state after that. To make sure that it does not happen, we can define these statements as a single transaction.

Transaction
  |-Insert record into A
  |-Update record of B
  |-Update another record of B
  |-Insert record into C
  \-Commit

If one of these statements fail, all changes done by previous statements can be undone and the database will return to the state before we started manipulating it. That is great, because we can now guarantee that even though an error has happened, the data will remain in a consistent state.

We could even extend that with additional application logic, for example we insert three records and then we check if the values of all records add up to a certain threshold, if yes, we simply undo the changes. Or if we notice that a constraint has been violated (though, pretty much all databases support constraint definitions in one way or the other). Additionally, transactions are completely isolated from all other connected clients. That means that if we start a transaction and insert a record into table A, all other clients will not see this record until we commit our changes. So the data is never in an inconsistent state, not even temporarily or transiently.

What are Savepoints?

Savepoints are sub-transactions within another transaction. It allows to undo parts of an ongoing transaction.

Another example:

Transaction
  |-Insert record into A
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert another record into A
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert another record into A
  |-Insert child record into B
  |-Insert child record into B
  \-Commit

This is a little bit more fabricated and complicated, assume we want to insert three master records with two detail records each. The following conditions apply:

• If a master record fails to insert, nothing should be inserted.
• If a detail record fails to insert, the corresponding master record should also not be inserted.

This is hard to do with a simple transaction, but is quite easy when it comes to using savepoints:

Transaction
  |-Savepoint 1
  |   |-Insert record into A
  |   |-Insert child record into B
  |   \-Insert child record into B
  |-Savepoint 2
  |   |-Insert another record into A
  |   |-Insert child record into B
  |   \-Insert child record into B
  |-Savepoint 3
  |   |-Insert another record into A
  |   |-Insert child record into B
  |   \-Insert child record into B
  \-Commit

We create a savepoint before the insert of the master record, if the insert of the master record fails we rollback the transaction, if the insert of a detail record fails we rollback to the savepoint we created earlier. This allows quite complicated and nested transactions, especially because there is no defined limit to how deep savepoints can be nested.

Error behavior

Of course it can always happen that a statement fails for one reason or another, so it is important to know how the database behaves once an error occurred. We built ourselves another simple example:

Transaction
  |-Insert record into A
  |-Insert record into B (this fails)
  |-Insert record into C
  \-Commit

We insert three records, and the second one fails to insert. How should the database behave in such a situation? Turns out that this differs between different database systems.

Silent/Automatic restore to a previous state

Many databases perform a simple "silent/automatic restore to a previous state", all changes done (if any) of the current statement are undone and the transaction can be treated like the failing statement never happened. With the example above, and assuming that we do not cancel the transaction on an error, the records would be inserted into A and C.

In our tests Oracle, MySQL/MariaDB, H2 and SQLite were all behaving this way.

Requiring manual recovery

PostgresSQL requires to perform a "manual recovery" from a failed statement. So that once an error occurred during a transaction, the user has to revert to a (manually) set savepoint or rollback the complete transaction. We will go into details on that later.

Reverting everything and happily continuing

MS SQL on the other hand has a quite different approach. When an error occurs during a transaction, all changes are (automatically) rolled back but the transaction can still be used. So in our example, only the record in C would be inserted.

PostgreSQL JDBC and Savepoints

Back to PostgresSQL and how it requires manual recovery. When a statement fails within a transaction in PostgreSQL, the transaction enters the aborted state and one can then see an error like the one below if further statements are issued:

Current transaction is aborted, commands ignored until end of transaction block.

What that means is simple that the connection/server is still waiting on input on what to do with the transaction. There are three possible ways to recover from there:

1. Rollback the complete transaction
2. Commit, which will be transformed into a rollback at this point
3. Rollback to a savepoint

But these actions must be initiated by the user before the transaction can be further used (or not, if it is being rolled back completely). If one wants to emulate the behavior of other databases in PostgreSQL, every statement that is executed within a transaction has to be "wrapped" with a savepoint, in pseudo-code:

Even though that seems tedious, that is not the case. If you have such a requirement you already have central point through which all statements pass before being executed, so this can be implemented easily.

JVx and Savepoints

In our case it is DBAccess, our main datasource. Because every database interaction has to pass through DBAccess (in one way or the other), we could easily implement such emulation at a low-level and it is automatically available to all users. To be exact, DBAccess has received internal support to wrap all statements in savepoints when configured to do so. This configuration possibility is protected and is currently only used by the PostgresSQL DBAccess extension. It does exactly what it says on the tin and is only active when enabled and automatic commits have been turned off. So this change does have no effect on any other database but PostgreSQL.

We already have plans to extend this basic savepoint support with a public API which allows users of JVx to utilize this new functionality. One of the ideas that we are currently discussing is to provide the ability to create named savepoints. A simple mockup of that idea:

As said, we are currently in the process of discussing such possibilities but definitely want to provide such an API at one point.

Conclusion

As it turns out, the "special" behavior of PostgreSQL isn't as special as it seems to be. It is a design decision that was taken and that is understandable. Changing this behavior now, 20+ years in, is out of the question as it would require a substantial effort to make sure that this behavior is backwards compatible. The gains from such a change on the other hand would be very little, as it is a quite specialized case in which this behavior matters and the "fix" is rather easy.

We have a new AddOn for all VisionX users. It's the Embedding AddOn.

The new AddOn makes it possible to embedd one work-screen into another work-screen. Simply re-use screens in other screens.

Get an impression

The AddOn is commercial and not included in VisionX. Contact our sales team to get more information!

Some years ago, we put all our documentation into our Forum. This wasn't a perfect system for our documentation, but it was in one place. But now we know that the Forum was a bad idea for framework and product documentation.

Last year, we started an evaluation for a new documentation system and were shocked about the quality and features of available solutions. We found a SaaS solution but we didn't want to store our documentation elsewhere. After some research we made a decission and our new documentation system was DokuWiki. The system itself is very nice but the standard theme is not pretty. But it's pluggable and there are many nice looking themes and very useful plugins.

After some customization we were very happy with the result and the migration from our Forum to the DokuWiki was not a hard task. It's still in progress, but we're happy to announce that our new docu system is available for you!

The new link is https://doc.sibvisions.com/

The new system contains some many information about VisionX as well. We didn't publish this information in the past.

Have fun with our new documentation system!

Our Forum will be continued, but only as place for questions and answers.

DokuWiki

is a simple to use and highly versatile Open Source wiki software that doesn't require a database.

It's a really nice software for your documentation. The default theme isn't super modern, but it works. There are many custom themes available and styling is simple.

The really cool thing is the remote API of DokuWiki. It has a XML based RPC interface. Here are some details.

The documentation looks promise. There's a Java example
But the last update of the Java client was 2016

After downloading and testing the client, it was clear that it doesn't work. It had a problem with cookie management. I tried to fix the problem in the base lib - aXMLRPC but it was tricky. The problem was the standard Http URL connection. After replacing it with Apache HttpClient, the dokujclient was working without problems.
I didn't try to find the root cause of the problem because it wasn't worth the time. It was faster to replace the communication part.

Here's a link to our patch and all required libraries (pre-built).

Here's a short snippet

We use the remote interface for automatic article updates. It works great!

We're happy to announce the release of EPlug 1.2.7. This minor update comes with a big performance improvement!

Major performance improvement

The most notable and important feature of this release is the major speed improvement when checking files. We've revisited how the build pipeline works and could determine quite a few bottlenecks which did not only encumber the build process, but also the live checks of databooks. After fixing these bottlenecks the databook live checks are blazing fast and one does not notice any more that these are active.

While reviewing the code, we also saw the possibility for a few more tweaks which we will incorporate into the next major release, to squeeze even more performance out of this.

Improved DataBook View

The DataBook view has also received some much needed attention. There is now a toolbar button which allows to sort the columns by their name (instead of their order as returned by the datasource). Additionally the view does no longer flicker when refreshing and will also clear itself when the last editor closes.

Other fixes

1. There is no longer a sleeping EPlug job in the Progress View.
2. The EPlug preferences are now only available on Java projects.
3. If there is no screen lifecycle object, the session object is now used.
4. Removed raw HTML in tooltips.

How to get it?

Simply update EPlug via Eclipse!

We're happy to announce that JVx 2.7 is available. It's a bigger bugfix release with a small number of new features.

What's new?

• Tibero Database Support
• boolean support

  Our DBAccess implementation now supports boolean as parameter.

• SimpleJavaSource

  It's now possible to create java objects from java source code, see our REST interface

• Struct support

  Struct support for Oracle DB in procedures and functions.

• Session timeouts

  We fixed the problem of session timeouts with long up/downloads.

• WorkScreen

  It's now possible to open a work-screen with additional parameters. A new (optional) Parameter class is available.

• Mac OS

  We fixed the problems with internal frame borders.

• Many improvements

The full changelog is available here.

Start with JVx

If you create an application with VisionX, it's always a JVx based application. You get all advantages of JVx and its GUI independency, but sometimes the GUI indepency is not important and you want to use native GUI controls in your JVx application because JVx doesn't contain the GUI control or you need a commercial control. This is a very simple use-case and it's not a problem to mix JVx components with native components. We have different examples, with different GUI technologies, for this use-case.

Here are some links:

• User defined Components
• JavaFX, JVx, CalendarFX and Exchange Server
• JVx Reference, Custom Components
• JVx Reference, Resource and UIResource

But we don't have a link for our Vaadin implementation. But no problem, here it is!

Simply create a new application with VisionX and a dummy screen like this one:

Simple screen

The screen contains a simple table and two editors. Nothing special. Now we want to add a custom Vaadin component in the empty space. It doesn't matter which component you use. Every vaadin component or AddOn component can be used. JVx doesn't do specific things, it's only an UI abstraction layer.

So, lets add an Accordion to the screen:

Integrated Accordion

The Accordion component is a standard Vaadin component, simply added to the screen. But more... Do you see the "Show Vaadin Notification" Button? This is a standard JVx component. So we mix native vaadin components with standard JVx components and get the full power of both. One advantage of the JVx components is that the automatic translation works without additional hacks, or what about JVx' layouts, event handling, ...

Interested in the source code?

No worries, it's super simple to understand

Lets have a look at the custom code:

The Accordion source code was copied from Vaadin Sampler:

So, what are the most interesting parts in our code?

First, we add the JVx panel to another JVx panel. This is important to get support for translation. If it's not important for your, simply ignore the line:

The groupPanelOverview is a simple UIGroupPanel with UIFormLayout:

Our JVx button will be added to the native vaadin Accordion with following code:

We don't add the JVx component itself, we use the wrapped resource. This is a simple vaadin component: com.vaadin.ui.Button

And finally, we add the Accordion as custom component to our JVx group panel:

This code:

is important for VisionX because the vaadin components aren't available in Swing, so we use this check for the supported environment.

So far, we mixed native vaadin components with JVx components. It's super easy to use, isn't it?

But it's also possible to use CSS for JVx components:

Css style for Button

The button got the friendly style, which is defined in Vaadin CSS. Check some examples.

To add the friendly style class to the JVx button, simple add:

This example is using predefined CSS from vaadin. It's also possible to set custom styles in your own css file. Simple follow this instructions.

This article covered the integration of native vaadin components into an existing JVx application with all advantages of vaadin.

Let's talk about CellEditors, and how they are decoupled from the surrounding GUI.

What are they?

While we've already covered large parts of how the GUI layer and the model of JVx works, the CellEditors have been left completely untouched and unmentioned. One might believe that they can be easily explained together with the Editors, however, they are a topic on their own, and a complex one from time to time that is.

The difference between Editors (the UIEditor for the most part) and CellEditors is that the Editors only provide the high-level GUI control, while the CellEditors provide the actual functionality. Let's take a look at a quite simple screen.

We see a window with a table on the left and some editors on the right, simple enough. Now these components we are seeing are UIEditors, not CellEditors. The CellEditors themselves are only added as child components to the Editors, so the Editors are basically just panels which contain the actual CellEditor.

So technically every UIEditor is just another panel which gets the CellEditor added. The CellEditors themselves follow the same pattern as all GUI components in JVx, there is the base interface, an eventual extension of technology components, the implementation and finally the UI object. They are, however, rarely directly used in building the GUI, but mostly only referenced when building the model.

Why are they?

If you want to make GUI editor components, I know of two possible ways from the top of my head to achieve that: You create dedicated editor components for the datatypes that are available, for example a NumberEditor, TextEditor and so forth. Or you create one editor component which acts as a mere container and allows to plug in any wanted behavior for the type you're editing.

We've opted for the second option, because it means that the GUI is actually decoupled from the datatypes (and in extension the data) of the model. If we'd have separate components for each datatype, changing the datatype of a single column would mean that you'd have to touch all editors associated with that column and change that code, maybe with rippling effects on the rest of the GUI. With the CellEditors, one can change the datatype of a column and not worry about the GUI that is associated with that column. The CellEditor is changed on the model once and that change is automatically picked up by all Editors. Which also means that one can define and change defaults very easily and globally.

Of course one can also set the preferred or wanted CellEditor directly on the Editor, instead of using the one defined in the model, should the need arise.

And the table?

The same applies to the Table. Theoretically, every cell of the Table can be viewed as a single Editor, for this context at least. So a single cell behaves the same as an Editor when it comes to how the CellEditors are handled.

How many are there?

JVx comes with a variety of CellEditors out of the box:

• Boolean
• Choice
• Date/Time
• List
• Number
• Text
• HTML
• Multiline
• Password
• Standard

With these nearly all needs can be covered. If there is need for a new one, it can be created and added like any other UI component.

Using CellEditors

As said previously, which CellEditor is used is defined primarily with the model, for example:

We can see that every column has a datatype and every datatype has a CellEditor. That allows the model to provide the actual editing functionality without changing the GUI code. The Editor, when notifyRepaint() is called, will fetch the CellEditor from the datatype and use it. Additionally, there is a technology dependent default mechanism which allows this system to work even when the UI classes are not used.

Let's do a step by step explanation of what happens:

1. The model is created.
2. The GUI is created.
3. The model invokes notifyRepaint() on all bound controls.
4. The Editor gets the CellEditor from the model and adds it to itself.

One moment, instance sharing?

If we revisit at the example code from above, we will notice that the CellEditor instance is set on the model and must then be used by the Editor. That means that a single CellEditor instance is used for all bound Editors. We all know that sharing instances in such a way can be fun, but in this case it is not a problem because CellEditors are only "factories" for the actual editing components.

The ICellEditor interface does actually only specify two methods, whether it is a direct cell editor, and the factory method for creating an ICellEditorHandler. The CellEditorHandler is the manager of the instance of the component that is going to be embedded into the Editor.

1. notifyRepaint() is called on the editor.
2. The Editor gets the CellEditorHandler from the CellEditor.
3. The Editor gets the component from the CellEditorHandler and embeds it.

This mechanism makes sure that no component instances end up shared between different GUI components.

A closer look at the CellEditorHandler

If we take a good look at the CellEditorHandler interface, we see that it contains everything that is required for setting up a component to be able to edit data coming from a DataRow. One method is especially important, the getCellEditorComponent() function. It returns the actual technology component that is to be embedded into the Editor. That means that even though there are implementations for the CellEditors on the UI layer, the actual components which will provide the functionality for editing the data are implemented on the technology layer. A short refresher:

Revisiting our simple screen from above, we'd actually need to represent it as something like this:

Because the embedded components in the Editor are actually on the technology layer.

CellRenderers

There is another small topic we need to discuss, CellRenderers. They follow nearly the same schematics as CellEditors but are used to display values directly, for example values in a table cell. The Table is also the primary component which uses them to display the cell values until the editing is started. For simplicity reasons, most CellEditors implement ICellRenderer directly and provide management of the created component. That is because the reuse of components for barely displaying values is easier does not contain as much error potential.

Conclusion

CellEditors provide an easy mechanic to allow to edit data, and more important, they are decoupled from the GUI code in which they are used in a way which allows the model to change, even dynamically. That enables programmers to create and edit screens and models quickly without the need to check if the GUI and the model fit together, they always do.

Let's do a small experiment, and see if we can reduce the code required in screens and lifecycle objects to a minimum.

But be advised, this blog post is meant as a food for thoughts and less as a practical manual on doing things. So we will explore different possibilities which might not be practical.

Starting point

We will start with a small screen which has been automatically generated by VisionX, but has (manually) been stripped of all comments, documentation, imports and has some formatting modifications to make it easier readable in this post.

This is the PeopleWorkScreen class. It really doesn't do much except containing a Split panel, having on the left a table and on the right a few editors. That does look quite manageable, also it does look as one would expect in the GUI.

But it is a very good starting point for our experiments. As an additional note, we will lose VisionX support with all the changes we will make, unfortunately, that can't be circumvented I'm afraid.

Annotations for editors

The first thought one has when it comes to reducing code is to use Annotations to deliver important information. We can do this here, too, to remove some setup from the editors and instead add it to a more central place. So we will create a new Annotation which is holding the required information for the editors, which are the name of the databook and the name of the column.

As one can see, we've annotated the fields with our new Annotation and removed the setup lines from the initializeUI() function. Of course, that alone does nothing, we must add the processing of the annotations somewhere. The best place would be in the application when the workscreen is opened.

Easy enough, it removes some lines from the screen and the logic added inside the application is straightforward.

The upside is that we now have the information of the data binding right there in the field declaration, the downside is that it doesn't save us that much. In theory the gain is only 1 line per editor. We could do better than that.

Automatic editors

Annotations are interesting, but don't fit well here. We could do better when we extend the UIEditor itself and fit it with the necessary logic to be able to find its data binding on its own. That means that it would need to go upward at some point and find its parent workscreen to retrieve the datasource (which holds all the databooks). Walking upwards in the hierarchy is straightforward, the question is when we should do that? The best point in time would be when addNotify() is being called, because at that point the GUI is being created, so we are very, very likely inside the initializeUI() function of the workscreen or at a later point.

That removes the complete setup of the editor from the code, with the exception of the constructor, and instead the editor itself manages its own setup, neat. So I think we can't lose any more of the editor associated code at this point, the only further possibility would be to associate a "default" databook with the workscreen so that we can scrap the databook name from the constructor. Or, we could scan the fields of the screen and build the editors based on their name, but that is a rather fragile approach.

Inline fields

While we are at it and we will lose VisionX support anyway, we can inline the fields directly into the initializeUI() function to shed more lines.

That makes the code harder to read but in the end it saves a lot of lines.

Automatic databooks

Now the only part of the screen which we can now reduce is the model part. This is a little more complicated, though. First, if we create a databook on the fly it's a little bit more complicated to get it customized, so we have to assume that we can use the databooks "as they are", with all the necessary setup being done on the server side (which is ideal anyway). Second, ideally we could let the connection create the databooks as they are needed, that is a little bit more complicated and for this example we will add that logic to the screen instead. So the PeopleWorkScreen gains the method getDataBook(String) which gets or creates a databook for the given name and returns it.

and the changed editor

This introduces a quite unhealthy coupling between the PeopleWorkScreen and the AutomaticEditor, we can live with that for this example, but in a real application we'd have to correctly structure these objects. For example by introducing a workscreen base class, or by actually extending the datasource to provide this functionality.

If we ingore the method we just introduced in the PeopleWorkScreen, we actually managed to reduce the screen class a great deal and removed code which can be automated. That means that, at least theoretically, the likelihood of errors as we write the code has been lowered and it has become easier to write error free code. We can also now see that the screen class has become quite minimal, there really isn't anything left that we could restructure or remove.

Lifecycle objects

Now let us jump to the server and have a look at the associated lifecycle object.

There isn't much here that we can do, but a few small things might make it easier to write in the future. Again, we will be losing VisionX support if we edit this "too much", but we are far beyond that point anyway.

Reducing error potential

What can happen easily with managing storages is that one does copy and paste code and misses to edit the key, under which the storage is stored, correctly. That can happen quickly especially if there is a complex object hierarchy in place. So what we can do is separating the storing logic from the creation logic.

This has the upside that it would reduce the error potential greatly, especially with a lot of storages, and it would allow us to add additional safety checks, for example if a storage with that name is already existing and would be overridden. But it has the downside that with each access a new lambda function is created, that might or might not be important for your use case.

If we try to mitigate this side effect we will quickly reach certain limits, for example if we change the process to a registry based approach we will find that we've again introduced the very thing we wanted to remove. The storage configurer must be registered at the registry with a name and the storage must be received with a name, so we'd be back at square one, actually.

A more dynamic approach

To get rid of this duplication of the name we could create a registry with the configurers and use a generic approach to retrieving it. The problem here is that that is not possible at compile time, so what we need would actually be a system that catches non-matched calls for storages in the client/server connection and redirects it to our generic method. That is unfortunately not trivial and I will only outline this approach here now.

Now all that is missing would be that the connection is calling our getOrCreateStorage(String) method with the name of the requested object. Of course there is also a lot of error checking missing here, but that is not relevant for our example.

And again, if we remove the additional code we added, because it should be contained inside a base class, we have managed to reduce the code on the server side significantly. From here going any further becomes complicated, for example, again, one might to work with Annotations but that won't save us anything here anymore.

Conclusion

From time to time it is necessary to let the thoughts drift and think about different things, for example how to reduce the code inside of classes which are automatically generated and managed. Once I had a nice discussion with someone online on how to do things differently in their library. We had a little back and forth on what could be done and in the end we agreed that it should stay the way it was because none of the approaches we came up with had a significant advantage over the current state. In the end they said that, even though nothing came of it, it was an important discussion to have because from time to time one had to engage in such stimulated, technical and theoretical discussions, and I agree completely with that. It is important to be open to new ideas and consider different approaches even when they don't end up taken.