Technical White Paper (page 5)

Screen Programs

Boxes showing Entities, Elements, Rules, Programs, Events. Programs box is shaded.

The screen programs are now defined. Programs are defined in minutes from one of many templates, such as:

Maintenance
Enquiries
Menus
Breakouts (from one program to many others)

The deduction logic is already defined in the database and in the rules so entering the program name and text is the main effort.

Presentation Layer

The output is through a browser. The presentation layer is determined by Framesets that are created as a set of standards for your corporation. You may decide on a set number related to function to ensure consistency across your organization for all future projects.

Everything on the presentation layer is defined in a Stylesheet. You can have different iterations of Stylesheet for each menu or user group or even user - departmental variations, or customer/supplier variations are examples here.

Custom Designed Screens

Some corporations may require screens that are manually designed in HTML rather than automatically generated by the Generator. This is a very real requirement where graphic artists are involved and the pages reflect a particular style or presentation that is unique. In these cases, the HTML code uses a control linked to properties, which is effectively the element name.

Presentations in a graphical format on the web pages (for example, using Flash, Spatial Maps, Hyperbolic Trees, or other neural search engines) can be linked into the database in the same way.

Non-Screen Programs

The Designer supports Batch programs that can be triggered to run from a menu or are time-stamped to run automatically. There is a suite of functions to allow for edits and updates of input files from external systems (effectively re-use of the element rules), special rules for update functions, delete functions to remove redundant data in files, and links to external activities. An example of an external activity is to call and print reports.

XML Outputs

The result of a selection is normally output to a grid on the screen (as multiple records). The result can also be output to an XML file which is then available for:

Printing
Export to a spreadsheet or word processor
E-mail attachment
Export to another database

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