Hi all,

We received plenty of feedback indicating that customer and also Software AG employees would like to see enhancements to our current CAF controls documentation.
The next documentation improvement effort that I want to drive will target exactly this area.

In order to make sure that we deliver meets the expectations and needs of the people who work with CAF, I would like to get input from YOU:

- What are the top 5 controls that need better documentation?
(If you are willing to take the time to tell me what the top 10, 20 or 50 are even better! And I am also open to suggestions for how you would document them better, of course!)

Thanks in advance for taking a few minutes to write down your thoughts.

Best Regards,
Thomas

Hi Thomas!

You can start with 1) Table controls (mainly the tree tables). 2) Scripts 3) Search controls 4) How to handle the controls with javascript perhaps could be a good idea to integrate this in each control documentation.

In general will be usefull an explanation for each category of controls with examples.

As per how to document, check the Microsoft model for Silverlight

Good luck!
Edgardo

Better documentation(or inline visual cues) would be on how what are allowable containers from one container to another. It is really vague and a way to show what would be allowable would be great.

I would say, we need a better documentation for Extended Portlet URL and Portlet Script controls…

Hi,

I believe we need better documentation on:

1 - Script Controls
2 - Table Controls

It would be great to have also some webcast on common scenarios:

Like:

1. Cascade DropDownList (Ex. Auto Make and Model)
2. Table row

That is great feedback so far, thanks!
Please keep it coming.

Thanks,
Thomas

Hi.
I would like to see better documentation on how to implement simple partlets using the webMethods ESB. There should be many more samples on this.
Also an better explanation on where things should be processed and how, what can be placed in JS, what should be java code.

The samples provided today are also poorly documented.

See this post : http://tech.forums.softwareag.com/viewtopic.php?t=15985&sid=e3fdd95daa81b89b90a9c48bb0bb458f

And also the organization of the data elements in the designer view such as under Control → Table:

Async Column
… sporadic other elements
Hidden Column
… sporadic other elements
Standard Column
… sporadic other elements
Trucating Columns

then you organize that into an Alphabetical list which the the type of Column precedes the behaviour scatters columns in the list. So instead I think you could Call it
… sporadic other elements
Column - Async
Column - Hidden
Column - Standard
Column - Truncating
… sporadic other elements

And then your alphabetical sort in the list of the designer which result in more organized fashion oppose to the kind of scattered approach. It looks like there was some of this going on in the “Data Total” and “Data Total Selected” and “Tree” and “Tree Toggle”

Hi,

in my opinion the main problem is not the documentation of the single controls (although it may be worth to improve this as well) but the missing documentation about the overall concepts and how to start using CAF.

It may be easily accessible for JSF and Ajax experts, but our main goal is to enable even non Experts to create Portlets etc., and getting started for those people is quite hard.

After understanding the core concepts the examples on http://www.ajax-softwareag.com become helpfull, but they do not help getting started as well.

What’s also completely missing (please correct me if I just didn’t find it) is a reference for coding Java script and Java. The tutorials and samples just tell to copy some code to some place, but this does not help me for developing own code.

Hi,

There are a lots of capabilities that are hidden in webMethods and one of them being WSRP. I happened to stumble upon the WSRP producer/consumer page on system administration by chance and thats when I knew that it exists. But since lack of documentation I dont know what to do of it even though I want to use it. I dont even know what version of wsrp is supported.

Maybe we can find many more such potentials and document them better.

Hi,
I would like to see more documentation on the content providers.

Hi,
First of all, the description in Designer’s help for CAF components should have more than one line. That is the first place you usually look for details.

It is also important to describe the benefits and disadvantages of using one type of control over a similar one.

Clues to avoid pitfalls (it is better not to change this X control property unless...)

Detailed description of which type of ContentProvider is better for which CAF component and why.

Easily to deploy samples for EACH component.

br,
Vlad

Hi all,

I struggled a lot with SelectableListTableContentProvider and ListTableContentProvider when handling updateable lists. Also the concept of content providers would be interesting.

Also the client side controls (invoke script, return value script etc) inside tables are not documented or covered in samples.

Regards,
Mathias

I am new to webMethods CAF. I would prefer to have some sample on how to create webapplication in WM CAF. I think if you could add this thing in new documentation. It would be real good help.

A usability description is needed.
For instance:

• when should I use this control instead of that
• what other controls I need to use with this one
• how to integrate with other controls

Hi Thomas,

Appreciate the idea of getting feedback and preparing the documentation.

Present documentations mostly concentrating in Syntax and not in how to use. So please consider the following points while preparing the documentation.

1. Workable samples for each and every controls should be there.
2. There is nothing called getting started available for any of the webMethods product. Please add such documents which will be easy for us to learn.
3. Please enhance the documents available for tree controls and add things like along with which control some specific controls can be used.
4. There is no document/reference available for nested tables and dynamic creation of controls in CAF UI.
5. Procedure to be followed to use the control should be there in the document.

Thanks.

Hi Thomas,

I second all of Suresh’s comments above. On top of that:

1. In the CAF reference manual, the Java type required for the value of the control is incorrect for many of the controls. Usually the package in the manual is close to the actual package, but not exactly the same. I can find the correct class or interface by searching, but it can be timeconsuming.

2. The procedure for configuring the ws endpoint address from on an environment variable needs to be documented, preferably in a “getting started guide”. Anyone planning to deploy their CAF code to a production environment (which is everyone using it) needs to do this, yet it isn’t documented anywhere.

3. The procedure for adding custom-developed portal pages into the MWS noodle shell menu (fabric tasks) needs to be documented. In addition, the procedure for making changes (such as reordering the menu items) should also be documented.

4. In general, search through the forums for frequently-asked-questions, and loop them into the documentation.

Thanks and Best Regards,
Scott

Hello,

Do we have any results in this matter yet? Are there new Examples which we can download right now and will work without any IS services? So it only demonstrate how to use the controls?

Thank you very much.
Kind regards.
Tadeusz

All the latest documentation and samples are available here:

[url]http://communities.softwareag.com/ecosystem/communities/public/Developer/webmethods/products/caf/[/url]

We all are expecting the Controls Live Demo like www.zkoss.org/zkdemo/.

Hi Martin/sivaraman/All,

This http://www.ajax-softwareag.com/ no longer exists? Where can I find all examples listed in that site?. Plrase help me.

Regards,
Satish

All the latest documentation and samples are available here:

http://techcommunity.softwareag.com/ecosystem/communities/public/webmethods/products/caf/

I agree with some of the previous suggestions (e.g. content providers, script stuff) but here’s one that’s got me before:

Dependent dropdowns, where the values are prepopulated.

So say I wanted to pick a car, and I have three dropdowns: make, model and submodel.

I open a dialog, pick a car, a script control refreshes the next dropdown; I pick a model, a script control refreshes the last dropdown, I pick the submodel. I hit Okay on the dialog. I submit the task data (including what I’ve just selected) and head off to lunch.

Coming back from lunch I log in again, open up my task and realise I’ve selected the wrong submodel! So I open my dialog again, but the lazy developer has just set all three dropdowns to blank, because he couldn’t work out how to prepopulate the make, model and submodel dropdown options using the Software AG dependent dropdowns sample. So I have to click through all the dropdowns again - how annoying. I thought this new system was supposed to SAVE me time!

So there it is: how can I prefill the dropdowns based on the current values in my business data?

IMO the best documentation are examples, examples, examples. Why not providing a showcase page like

http://www.primefaces.org/showcase/ui/home.jsf

with a live demo and the source code?

-Bernhard

Agreed re: examples. What about a full example on how to create the correct provider for server-side filtering, including a simple web service in the example. Loads of stuff is skipped in that section of the documentation.

Also, the documentation often is just huge lists of identical stuff (e.g. do I really need to know what the Rendered property does for each control?)

Much more control-specific detail is needed.

Detailed documentation for charts could be very much helpful, and it would be good if we can have the API and use case documentation in HTML as we have for webMethods JAVA Api.

regards…
Abhishek Jain

Hi All and Thomas,

I have seen a document (8-0-SP1_Designer_CAF_Development_Help) where all the properties of a control is explained comprehensively. Specially those which can be configured by developer.

It briefly explains about the control and than list downs all the property of the control in tabular format.

This table contains the name of the property, default value, set of values allowed and comparative behavior of the control with different values.

It is very useful. But then this documents are not available in empower or http://techcommunity.softwareag.com/ecosystem/documentation

Moreover this documents should be available for all the version of the product.

One key point I want to highlight here is the tech forum search functionality is very poor. I am not sure only it Subject, Tag is part of search query. Thats why most of the search try result to Search Results: 0 records were found.

@Manoj Kumar, The documentation of the CAF controls and their properties was moved to the “CAF Tag Library Reference” starting with version 9.6 which is available from [url]http://techcommunity.softwareag.com/ecosystem/documentation[/url]

For OpenCAF, a showcase was provided on the community site that shows examples of each of the CAF controls. See: [url]http://techcommunity.softwareag.com/ecosystem/communities/public/webmethods/products/bpm_suite/codesamples/8ff47897-062c-11e6-b2c6-cd8d7ef22065/?title=OpenCAF+Component+Showcase+9.10[/url]