As I was finalizing the technical note for another gauge bean, it hit me that I wasted quite some time designing the visual part of the bean. In Oracle Forms, you create the bean on the canvas, assign it a height and width and then set up the implementation class. Now, in order to customize it, you would have to follow the bean's developer recommendations and use the set_custom_property built-in in order to modify the bean properties. However, this implies that as a developer, you would have to compile and run the module each time in order to see the result. In my case, it requires a number of iterations and that bothers me quite a bit. That's where I suddenly realized that when I designed MouliForms, I created a class that was basically a clone of the Oracle Forms property palette editor ( Remember F4 !!). I asked myself whether I can extend the same concept to Forms javabeans and here what I think should come out in a few days (hopefully not weeks):

Create an XML file that lists the bean's properties, categories they belong to and type (String, Int or boolean).

From the property palette editor, read and parse the XML file.

Developer will select the values for each property and then Preview the bean

If the developer is fine with the design, output the bean init procedure as an Oracle Forms program unit.

I guess that should do it and could be very useful.

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