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XAF – Mastering Domain Components, a How-to Series

     

This post may be outdated. For the latest Domain Components concepts and examples refer to the current online documentation.

A while ago I wrote a blog post detailing the state of Domain Component technology in the 10.2 release. In that blog post I said

“Meantime, we are also planning to provide a series of in-depth videos and blogs showing, via the XCRM application, how to implement most common business tasks using DC. This should help you see all of the benefits of this technology in action. With the help of XCRM and related learning materials, brand new users will be able to get started with DC faster, whilst advanced users will be able to learn the technology thoroughly.”

With the exception of the items mentioned here, DC is now completed and it’s time to get cracking with this series! Below you will find a list of the first six “How-tos” that we plan to publish (as we publish them I will update this post to provide links to the relevant posts):

1. How-to: Implement a default property for a business entity derived from multiple components
2. How-to: Implement notes functionality in a business entity
3. How-to: Implement address in a business entity
4. How-to: Implement calculated properties in a business entity
5. How-to: Implement a user-friendly identifier in a business entity
6. How-to: Mix Domain Components & Persistent Classes

Now, this is where you come in. Obviously our team understand DC completely and know exactly why certain design decision were taken during the creation of the XCRM project this, of course, makes it a little difficult for us to know exactly where the “tricky” areas are going to be for you, when you come to learn DC. In other words we need your advice. We need you to tell us if we are heading in the right direction with the series as far as the first 6 topics are concerned. What changes would you make, if any? What else do you want to see explained?

Please feel free to leave any comments you may have… well, in the comments. You can also email me directly at garys@devexpress.com if you want to expand on your ideas to an extent that would not easily fit in the comments. Thanks for your help, and we look forward to making this a great series from which you can truly master Domain Components!

That’s all for this post, until next time, happy XAF’ing! Smile

Published Feb 24 2011, 10:00 AM by Gary Short (DevExpress)
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Technorati tags: XAF, DC, Domain Components
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Comments

 

Arjan van Dijk said:

Are there any rules of thumb of how you can normalize functionality? With interfaces it is possible to define separate functionality on the smallest level and building very small building blocks.

This might affect performance too because a lot of db tables will be created for each and every interface.

February 24, 2011 2:47 PM
 

Alberto Cortes said:

That sounds great!   What about unit test and easy test with DC?

February 24, 2011 10:31 PM
 

Dennis (DevExpress Support) said:

@Alberto:

Writing functional tests using our EasyTest framework does not depend on whether you are using pure XPO or DC models. This is the main advantage of EasyTest - it is abstracted from your data model and depends on  the UI only. You can learn more about EasyTest in our docs. The XCRM demo (based on DC), shipped with XAF also contains examples of functional tests.

As for writing unit tests, it is also possible with DC and is not quite different than writing them for XPO models.

The XCRM demo contains examples as well.

However, thank you for the idea. We will consider it for future blog series.

February 28, 2011 7:31 AM
 

Dennis (DevExpress Support) said:

@Arjan: This problem is already on the radar (community.devexpress.com/.../96767.aspx) and we hope to resolve it in the release, but no exact promises as always. Please stay tuned for our future updates!

February 28, 2011 12:17 PM
 

drew.. said:

almost 3 weeks later, and no new posts.. can we get a less busy tech to create some more posts please? This should not have to be real time, the blogs could have been in development long ago. thanks for getting these out the door quickly..

March 14, 2011 3:17 PM
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