Developer Guide
These quick starts will help you get started using the SDK for developing and working with Transact Applications:
- App Package Quick Start shows how use the SDK Ant tasks to scaffold and deploy an application package into Transact Manager with a pre-built form.
- Fluent Functions Quick Start shows how scaffold and deploy a fluent function to log messages in TM and return data to the form that called it. Fluent Functions are services that are called when selected lifecycle events occur in a form.
- Form Functions Quick Start shows how to write a special type of Fluent Function that is called on-demand by code in a form, rather than in response to a form lifecycle event.
- Object Mapper Guide shows how to use the ObjectMapper to marshal data between Form XML Documents and Groovy Value Objects.
- Unit Testing Guide shows how to develop and run unit tests using JUnit and mocking and how to debug them in the SDK environment.
- App Test Framework Guide shows how to use the App Test Framework to perform functional integration testing of Transact Applications.
- Debugging Guide shows how you can use different techniques to help debug an application under development.
Development Process
The general development process using the Transact SDK follows this pattern:
Scaffold a new project using the main transact-sdk project - this creates a peer-level project to the transact-sdk project. At this point, the transact-sdk project is not required again until another new project needs to be scaffolded
Edit transact-auth.properties - provide appropriate server names and user credentials
Optionally edit build.properties in the new project - change any details you wish
If your project requires forms, create them in Maestro - Maestro is the only tool that allows you to create a new form from scratch:
- Create and build a new form in Maestro
- Download the TM Form Version from the Maestro Build dialog so you can include it in a form-def.json file after scaffolding a new form or in the first form included in the template by default
- When you initially build the form in Maestro, ensure you check the Build Option 'Use Transact Functions' if you will be developing with Transact Functions
Open or import the new project - depending on your IDE, this might need to be in a new window
Add Ant dependency libraries to the new project - libraries from the main transact-sdk project need to be added to the new project's Ant configuration so Transact Manager classes can be resolved correctly
Add the project's functionality as required by:
Scaffolding an application package into the project
Scaffolding new connections, services, forms and functions into the application package
Developing the application code
Developing the application unit test code
Running the unit tests to validate the application code
Deploy the project - which builds and installs the project application package to the configured server