Visualization

The data model which is built into Aria is a very powerful and versatile data storage mechanism, however, it can become quite difficult to navigate its multi layered hierarchy from a debugger. This is where the visualizer comes into its own.

The data visualization built into Aria is meant to be used as part of your development, debugging and testing but is not meant to be deployed as part of the final release application.

Using the Visualizer within the Aria Editor

Start the Aria editor in NetBeans and click the Aria|Visualization|Show the data visualizer menu.

The visualizer will appear docked in the NetBeans IDE and will reflect the data which is contained in the files referenced from the datasets.xml file. As you reference parts of the model from the components will build itself and you can use the visualizer to simplify the binding of components

• The left pane contains a tree which allows you to navigate all of the paths in the data model.
• When you click a node in the tree its attributes are displayed in the structure table on the top right of the window. This table will always include the `value' and `id' attributes regardless of whether they contain data or not.
• The refresh button below the model tree needs to be clicked whenever a change to the model has taken place if you want a true reflection of the current state of the data model.
• The toolbars above the data model and attributes tables offer a number of extra options for manipulation of the model. Some of these options are also available on the node's popup context menu.

Visualizer tools

Icon/Tool	Purpose
	Refresh the model
	Adds a new node to the model
	Deletes the current node from the model
	Edit the model node
	Rename the model node
	Add a new attribute to the model node. This method does not prevent duplicates
	Delete the selected attribute from the model node. The standard attributes (id and value) cannot be deleted
	Copy to the model path to the clipboard. The full path of the selected node is placed on the clipboard. This value can then be pasted as text.

The right pane of the Visualizer contains two tabs: structure and visualizer.

The structure tab contains a table displaying the selected model's attributes and its values. The third runtime column indicates whether the attribute is also available in the runtime mode (some attributes are used only to configure the datasource in the Visualizer and thus are not visible in the runtime mode, the example of that is POJOs getter attribute).

The visualizer tab is used for rendering data model nodes in a way that is specific to the selected data type. For instance, with the database table node selected in the visualizer's tree, the tab will contain a JTable component reflecting the data from the selected table

The visualizer tab can be used also for setting some specific model nodes configuration. The example of that is a panel that allows the user to specify values of the POJOs property parameters (in other words: to specify parameters of the getters which define POJO properties).

If you wish you can pre-define your model in one of the dataset files then you can start binding your screen components more easily. For example you can define the following nodes in the model

Predifined model

<datasets>
 <dataset id="${getCustomerID()}">
   <data value="" id="surname"/>
   <data value="" id="dob"/>
   <data value="" id="firstname"/>
   <data id="gender"/>
   <data value="" id="title"/>
   <data value="" id="address1"/>
   <data value="" id="address2"/>
   <data value="" id="address3"/>
   <data value="" id="postcode"/> 

Now, open the customer details page and click on the customer surname edit field. Expand the data model in the visualizer and double click on the node ${getCustomerID()}/surname . You will see the data property for the component change to this value and any time you click on this component the visualizer will automatically select this node.

Setting up database table binding using the Visualizer

Debugging with the Visualizer

The visualizer makes it easier to debug your Aria applications as it provides you with an up to date representation of the datamodel at any given time. When you start a debugging session for a Aria application from netBeans the visuaslizer will automatically update with the state of the model. It will start from the root of the project's model and create the entire model hierarchy.