I am only able to use connectors in enterprise architect with traditional 0..* style multiplicity rather than crow's feet connectors. I've tried using different drawing styles and still cannot work out how to change the connectors. Any help would be very much appreciated :)
I found a way to use the crow's foot notation. Actually it's pretty simple. Here's how to do it:
Right-click data-diagram and select properties (you can do it in the working area directly or through browsing the Project Browser).
Navigate to the Connectors tab.
On the right side you'll see a small section labeled "Connector Notation", there you select "Information Engineering" and that's it!
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I just saw nice little demo about Oracle ADF Rich components: http://download.oracle.com/otn_hosted_doc/jdeveloper/11gdemos/adffaces/adffaces.html.
Looks really cool, nice and easy but of course its just a demo :). I would like to ask if someone actually uses it for a production app, how they compare to popular open source alternatives like RichFaces or IceFaces etc.
How about a deployment to a different server than weblogic?
We use ADF Faces. It is quite good. They have all the basic components(input text, output text, input file, date pickers, tables, etc) and some advanced components(graphs, tree,tree tables, etc). The layout components are also good and will suffice for most use cases.
But as with any JSF component, ADF Faces Components are hard to modify. For instance, if you want to add, say, a placeholder text, on an input text then you need to resort to fragile hacks.
I would recommend ADF Faces for enterprise apps where the ability to alter and fine tune UI components is not as important as fast and low cost development.
Also, ADF Faces isn't just a component framework. It is a full ViewController framework. Check out their Task Flows and you will be amazed.
We also use ADF Framework for our current product where we migrate our existing form based product to the new framework.
The major benefit that I'd like to point out in ADF is the way they promote declarative programming. I have to admit being a strong java developer, I have the tendency to go and add my own programmatic handling, but for someone who is used to forms, they will find it easy to learn the basics.
A strong feature that I also like to point is the way they clearly defined the MVC architecture. Model = BC, Controller = TaskFlow, View = well this one is obvious. Kudos to ADF the way they designed the taskflows as you get to have a visual representation or better put, a story of your design as well as your logic.
I am not sure about using a different server as ADF along with JDeveloper gives quite a load of features which allows you to configure directly to your server and be able to test on your intergrated server as well, with this I mean more on the security side as well as authentication piece of it. So even if you are able to migrate all the libraries needed, you might still be missing out in some of the other technologies that can be easily integrated with a weblogic server. (such as webcenter, soa etc.)
I'm looking to build a reporting portal on top of our database which is SQL Server 2008 R2.
It's been suggested that I use SSRS, and I've played around with it for a few hours. I found it very easy to point it to a table and have it generate a table/graphs for you. It could all be done in a few minutes, and that's great.
I had a hard time customizing the report to make it look nice. I thought it was like using Word to design a website, the customization was pretty limited. I have experience in web development using ASP.NET with jQuery, and I'm currently thinking that I could make the portal much faster if I could use my experience with those technologies.
I'd like to get advice on which path is best for my project.
Queries to the db are fairly simple, but not trivial. I have no problem building the data and business layers myself by using Linq-to-Sql.
I do not need print support
I need an emailing system that sends out reports every day, which I can also build myself (it doesn't need to let users subscribe to reports)
Don't need the flexibility of having users create their own reports. This is only for 2-3 different reports.
I enjoy the development experience using web technologies and feel comfortable building a pleasant user experience with jQuery and plugins. I fear that using SSRS, I would be limited to something ugly and not "fun" to use.
I want this project to be up in 2-3 weeks. I can't afford to re-invent the wheel for everything, but I also don't want to spend most of my time asking questions like "how do I make a fade-in effect in ssrs?"
How easy is it to customize the UI? Are there good examples online of what can be achieved? Does SSRS have some advantage that I could hardly get by writing my custom solution? I'm thinking in terms of application performance and overall functionality.
Thanks for your input.
I have built custom web interface to a suite of SSRS reports. You can easily do this, and submit the gathered report parameters to Reporting Services, and have it render the generated report to a web page, all as if the user had used the SSRS interface to begin with.
Some comments i would make:
let SSRS handle the reporting side of things. It has all the power and features you could need. And its free. And tested. And extensible. And renders to multiple (printable) formats.
you could maybe look at buying a set of controls designed to be used with SSRS to get even nicer chart output
you can build your own (parameter gathering & report triggering) interface within three weeks, but the schedule will be tight
you can't use jQuery within the rendered reports. A lot of the HTML within the rendered report is hardcoded template type code (styles etc are embedded into the report rather than linking to an external file)
you don't need jQuery fade-in panels to make your reports pretty :)
So, as you know SSRS allows web and winforms output, printing, and all that. But your users will undoubtedly end up bugging your for PDF and Excel exporting, which is also built-in.
It's also a lot easier to edit the reports without having to alter your app and as you mentioned it has the emailing built in.
SSRS is quite powerful if you play around with the grouping and parameterization. The designer is a little clunky as you make more complicated reports, but I've always been able to design what I want. I've not used Crystal Reports but presumably it's even more powerful but it is another thing to learn and obtain.
I use 2 main reporting tools (Business Objects and SSRS) and also Microsoft Access. I can honestly say that I prefer SSRS for 95% of the work I do. The users really like all the drill through options you can do. For example lets say you have a chart showing widgets sold, you can click on that bar of the bar graph and have it drill to a report showing a breakdown of which widgets were sold.
This ability of going from a “high level” to low level detail is really powerful to the users. As for looks, I quite like the default controls that ship with report builder 3.0, they have come a long way and just look what is around the corner with project crescent
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/sqlrsteamblog/archive/2010/11/09/a-glimpse-at-project-crescent.aspx
I know it's probably not a WEB-BASED technology but I would definitely give Crystal Reports a try. Specially considering your time constraints...
I think we're all aware of what "your company's line-of-business software" looks like.
(source: glompix.com)
Are there any resources, rules of advice, or general tricks to visually taming applications like this? Our business's domain is pretty complex, as most are, and our customers demand a great amount of flexibility. Tracking a boatload of fields on each object isn't exactly avoidable.
Besides general advice, I'm also interested in usage and tools specific to WinForms. If there are any examples of (visually) well-designed software of this type, that would help as well.
There is a site that I visit every now and then to be reminded of what not to do:
Interface Hall of Shame.
A quick googling turns this up, which goes more into detail of the most common UI mistakes, which boils down to:
Non-Standard GUI Controls
Looking Like a GUI Control Without Being One
Inconsistency
No Perceived Affordance
Tiny Click Targets
No Feedback
Out to Lunch Without a Progress Indicator
Bad Error Messages
Asking for the Same Info Twice
No Default Values
Dumping Users into the App
Not Indicating How Info Will Be Used
System-Centric Features
There are some books that you should read too:
(source: mac.com)
(source: mac.com)
(source: mac.com)
Mainly, try to use the platform standard widgets, guidelines and rules.
I'm a programmer who used to work in a publications department. My advice is: Use a graphic designer; trust their opinions; and know if you are not one.
Here at the office, where we don't have a graphic designer, we have a bi-weekly "interface meeting" with a few developers and a few non-developers to hammer out these sorts of problems and develop design rules we can follow.
I want to utilise the 3dwall feature of cooliris, the physics effects of the icons in bumtop to design an application for making the image viewing more intuitive and interactive. I dont want to use flash as it would slow down the speed for interaction on desktop. PLease could someone tell me about
choice of
1.) physics engine - physx or ODE for the physics effects like bumtop
2.) opengl or direct 3d
3.) WPF(windows presentation Format) - what is its use
Flash with Actionscript 3 is the best for such things. Checkout http://www.flashloaded.com/flashcomponents/3dwall/ for an illustration of CoolIris type application in Flash.
WPF is great for building application like this. VS2008 doesn't provide solution for good visualization,
but you can always call for help Blend included in MS Expression. There you can select silverlight project for building fancy web applications (silverlight.net/showcase). At start, combining different controls and trigger events to start simulations is entirely included. Yes, inside Blend you can set frame keys like in flash.
It's certainly a lots of effort, but it don't need to be. Recently new set of WIN RadControls for WinForms and Silverlight are issued and they look, believe me, excellent. You can look for Run Demo program which shows example of using these controls. Under section Integration, Carousel and others you will see what you looking for and beyound.
I have a data structure that represents a directed graph and I'm looking for a good Silverlight visualisation to allow me to navigate from node to node, preferably with some nice animation.
Does anyone know of any good UI controls or frameworks for this kind of display? Even a sample from another field (maybe a social network?). My graphs don't have many nodes so performance won't be an issue.
I've seen the Prefuse library for Java (and Flash) which would be ideal. The "Degree of Interest" visualisation is the kind of thing I'm after, but I can't find anything in Silverlight.
Thanks for any tips.
There's an open source option that's part of the Silverlight Bag-O-Tricks. Check it out and see a demo here (use the first demo link):
http://www.codeplex.com/BagOTricks
There's also a WPF version:
http://j832.com/bagotricks/
Try this one
http://graphlight.codeplex.com/
I made a graph library for Silverlight, that uses Dot as basis.
Please check out: http://dot2silverlight.codeplex.com/
I am making some improvements to support more shapes and types of arrows.
daniela
Must admit I haven't tryed it out yet my self but quickgraph looks promissing
#Rune FS
QuickGraph has no visualisation capabilities, at least not for Silverlight. It just handles the graph data structures and algorithms.
QuickGraph does make it easy to construct a graph and output to Directed Graph Markup Language (DGML) which can be viewed in VS 2010. I just checked in changes to the project and I noticed that it has been designed to be built for inclusion into Silverlight. So perhaps you could use it in conjunction with a silverlight DGML viewer