Stage 9 – Arranging Views into Perspectives

Stage Goals

Tersus Concepts Covered

On completion of this stage you should be familiar with the following concepts:

Application Functionality Modeled

In the following stages we are going to model more views, in addition to the three already modeled. The additional views will be used by the purchaser and the shipping clerk. It would be a good idea to organize and group the views according to the different roles of users: Employee, Manager, and Purchaser.

This stage’s modeling should be performed in the Tutorial 8-9 project, you imported at the end of the previous stage.

User Modeling

The application currently looks as follows:

The three views, Open Requisitions, Requisition Approval, and All Requisitions, are grouped together. We would like to group them so that Open Requisitions and All Requisitions (used by all employees) are separated from Requisition Approval (used by managers), as in the following screenshot:

The main visual difference between the two screen shots is the use of multiple Perspectives, appearing as tabs vertically on the left side of the screen (two in this case: Employee and Manager).

Perspectives are used to group together multiple views. The default behavior, for views not defined in a perspective, is to group all views in a single perspective whose name is the root model name (in our case, Tutorial 8-9 - as demonstrated in the first screen shot).

Add a Perspective (Employee)

Do the following to define the Employee perspective:

Zoom to the Tutorial 8-9 root model.

Add a Basic/System template (). Name it Employee.

Zoom into the Employee system.

Drag the Open Requisitions view and the All Requisitions view from the repository (or outline) into the Employee system.

The model should look as follows.

Save your work and view the application in the browser. The application should look as follows:

We have not removed the three views from the root model; therefore they still appear in a default perspective named after the root model.

Now, click on the new Employee perspective.

You should see the following:

The Employee perspective is defined correctly.

The application model as it is now defined demonstrates the fact that views, as with other model types may be reused in an application (in the case of views, reusing across perspectives).

Remove the Default Perspective

To remove the default perspective, Tutorial 8-9, do the following:

Zoom to the Tutorial 8-9 root model.

Select each of the three views Open Requisitions, Requisition Approval, and All Requisitions and delete them from the view.

We have deleted the Requisition Approval view from its parent model. This is not a problem, since the Requisition Approval model remains in the repository.

Add an additional Perspective (Manager)

Last, let’s create the Manager perspective.

Do the following to define the Manager perspective:

Zoom to the Tutorial 8-9 root model.

Add a Basic/System template. Name it Manager.

Zoom into the Manager system.

Drag the Requisition Approval view from the repository into the Manager system.

The model should look as follows.

Save your work and view the application in the browser. The application should look as follows:

The grouping of views into perspectives may later be used in conjunction with the built-in support for a User/Permissions system to specify which perspectives are displayed after a user logs in to the system.

Completing Stage 9

Import the sample project Tutorial 9-10 and use it as the basis for the next stage of the Tutorial 8-9.

For a reminder on how to import a sample project, see the Importing a Sample Project section at the end of Stage 2.

This sample project contains all the functionality modeled thus far.

The sample project also includes additional functionality as follows:

1. Add a new Purchaser perspective and a Manage Suppliers view, containing a table and a “Populate” process.

2. Define a new database table, Supplier.

3. Model the Populate Supplier List process to initiate the display of the suppliers list

4. To Manage Suppliers view, add a Button Row with an Add Supplier button containing a Enter New Supplier popup.

5. Add display elements to the Enter New Supplier popup.

6. Implement the Enter New Supplier/Submit button (similar to the Enter New Requisition/Submit button we created in the beginning of the tutorial).

You may now proceed to Stage 10, in which we are going to model a process which imports a list of suppliers from an excel worksheet into the database.

See It Live

Click here to open the live project in a separate window.