Project: Implement Registry Extension (RXT) 2.0 + Associated UI support - Updates and Notes

This is an update of  my project so far in GSOC 2014. There was a slight change in the project scope since the JSON support for RXT was temporarily removed and the scope was narrowed down to creating a Jaggery app which could support creating a new artifact type with an intuitive drag and drop UI.

I had a meeting with my mentor and few others in WSO2 last week and below are the facts which were discussed.

• Finalized the requirement of a Jaggery app to create a new artifact type which could be installed to either Greg or ES via Management Console
• RXT <content> should be generated using drag and drop components and user shall be able to change the fields easily by dragging components here and there.
• The RXT XML should be generated in the client side using JS as well as some metadata should be kept with UI fields in order for ES to generate its ‘add metadata’ model.
• This model should also facilitate creating a JSON out of the UI, at some point of time.
• Once the XML is generated, a backend call will be made to Registry to add the RXT via Jaggery.

Current Progress

In the Process of finding a suitable plugin for drag and drop functionality, I looked upon Gridster.js [1] was used in UES and is very flexible in generating UIs. But it seems to be bit difficult to use it in this purpose, since it needed a lot of fine tuning to be able to cater this requirement. Then I found Bootsnipp Form Builder [2] which seems to be bit similar to the one which is required under MIT license and built on bootstrap. So decided to go on with it.

I was able to create a simple UI, create a Jaggery app and host it in Greg/ES and test the functionality. Below is a sample UI which has only the basic functionality to create a RXT.

                                           

I was told several issues the existing RXT, XML model has and the difficulties in rendering the UI (in ES) only with the information it provides and necessity of keeping other metadata along with the xml model. So I’ working on a way to find out the best possible way to bridge the gap between the RXT xml and the UI it is generating in ES side.

Next Steps

• Write a JS script to generate the RXT xml from the form data/HTML
• Keep other metadata which are not going in to the xml in a JSON model (tentative)
• Call backend Registry client/stub and send the RXT to registry.
• Try to load RXT xml data to the UI back when editing a RXT artifact.

Github Repo : https://github.com/ireshapm0/ArtifactBuilder

[1] http://gridster.net/

[2] http://bootsnipp.com/forms