News, tips, tricks and more about DevExpress Application Framework (XAF) directly from the lab: February 2015

Thursday, February 26, 2015

How to implement and where to put business logic in XAF?

We have recently rolled out another update of our online documentation where we isolated and detailed one of the most common questions beginners have. Actually, the answer was already present in the docs, KBs and examples and we have just reorganized these learning materials so that you need to know is in one place.

Please be sure to check out the new concepts section at eXpressApp Framework > Concepts > Data Manipulation and Business Logic even if you are an experienced XAFer. This is not the final version and we have several updates planned for this section in the near future.

If you are getting started with the framework, then running through the eXpressApp Framework > Getting Started > Basic Tutorial (SimpleProjectManager Application) tutorial will be a prerequisite.

I also want to remind you that our What's New documents for new product versions include the lists of documentation changes (What's New In Help) where you can find other interesting stuff like this, e.g.: this is what we have in v14.2.5 for XAF.

Please let me know what you think in comments to this blog. Thanks in advance!

Check out an example demonstrating a possible way of integrating Snap reports in an XAF WinForms application

The example integration shows how to store DevExpress Snap reports layout in business objects and show a list of these objects, as this is done in the built-in Reports module. The main tool for working with these reports is a custom Snap designer form. Underlying business objects can be configured using custom buttons from this form. It is also possible to show a read-only preview form using corresponding actions.

You can download the actual test project and research the example implementation from here:

https://www.devexpress.com/issue=T164798

Starting with v15.1, XAF Web pages will be rendered using the HTML5 document type mode by default

We primarily needed this for better operation of the ASP.NET end-user report designer we integrated in XAF v14.2 + some other great stuff we are currently working on for the next major release.
Technically, this means that XAF *.ASPX pages will have <!DOCTYPE html> at the top and there will also be the doctypeMode setting in the web.config file:

<devExpress>
<settings rightToLeft="false" doctypeMode="Html5" ieCompatibilityVersion="edge" />
<compression enableHtmlCompression="true" enableCallbackCompression="true" enableResourceCompression="true" enableResourceMerging="true" />
<themes enableThemesAssembly="true" />
</devExpress>

You can learn more on this setting in the documentation for our ASP.NET controls.
Take special note that this rendering mode slightly changes alignment of images within table cells as per https://developer.mozilla.org/en/docs/Images,_Tables,_and_Mysterious_Gaps
With this mode, our ASP.NET controls also globally adjusts tables and their cells as per this styles definition:

/* Html5 styles */
table { border-width: 0; border-collapse: collapse; border-spacing: 0; }
td, th { padding: 0; }
.dx-p1 { padding: 1px; }
.dx-p2 { padding: 2px; }
.dx-p3 { padding: 3px; }

In general, this post is just for informational purposes only as there is nothing to worry about for you - everything will "just work" as before, but a bit better:-)

Tuesday, February 3, 2015

Storing security settings (users, roles, permissions) and application-specific data in separate databases

I wanted to inform the community of a solution we have just finished testing for the next XAF version in response to the following customer's business scenario:

"We have 2 content databases and we will be running multiple applications on the same databases. Therefore i would like to have a separate database for each application to store the application specific data in...For security reasons we are not allowed to store security data in the same DB as our other data. It not our choice."

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