Uniface Development Objects
Development objects are application definitions for logical application units, such as components, fields, properties, messages, variables, and so on. During compilation, development objects are used to generate executable runtime objects and libraries, which can be packaged into archives for immediate deployment.
Development objects define the data accessed by the application, the layout and appearance of components, the user interactions, default behavior, and processing performed by the application.
All development objects are created and maintained using the Uniface IDE and stored in the Uniface Repository, an SQL-capable database.
Technically, a development object is a data type that defines the characteristics and properties that various types of application definition can have. There are many types of development object, but they are all specializations of the basic Uniface Development Object. For more information, see Development Objects Reference.
Main Development Objects
Development objects that do not have a parent, such as components and application shells, are called main development objects. Each Main Development Object is the root object for a collection of development objects that together form a self-contained application unit such as a Project, Modeled Entity, Component, or Library. Each main development object has its own editor, which is used to define it and its child objects.
For example, a Component is a main development object in which you create Entity and Field objects that define the component data. A Snippet Library is a main development object in which you create code snippets of ProcScript, JavaScript, or HTML that you can copy into your script during development.
For source control purposes, a main development object can be saved, with all its children, as a single file that has the same name of the main development object. This file can be loaded from the work area, overwriting the existing object definition in the Repository. This makes it much easier to manage application sources in a source code control system.
