Building a deployable application

Along with this section, the following sections provide more information about working with deployable applications:

In Developer Studio, each application appears as an entry in the AR System Navigator Applications branch, as shown in the following figure. Use this location to open and work in the application, including such tasks as adding forms and workflow to the application, exporting the application, and opening the application object for editing.

Applications branch with Home Page application opened


Because an application is itself an AR System server object, an Applications node appears in the All Objects branch of the AR System Navigator, as shown in the following figure. You can also open an application for editing from this location.

Applications node in server object list with Home page application opened


The following steps describe one good approach to creating, defining, and deploying an application:

1. Determine the forms required for the application user interface.
2. Determine the roles required to control access to the application and its functionality. When you plan a deployable application, be sure to design the access control roles required by the application early in your work. With a clear idea of application roles, you can assign permissions to forms, fields, active links, and active link guides as you define them. With the roles defined, you can set default permissions that will be automatically applied to objects created in the application.
3. Create the roles, test groups, and test users so you can test the forms and workflow in the application as you define it. Map the roles to the test groups.
4. Configure default permissions for the application.
5. Create the deployable application object and set its permissions.
6. Create the objects in the deployable application:
   • Create the forms required for the application user interface.
   • Create supporting forms, workflow, menus, images, and other supporting objects as required by the functionality of the forms you create.
   • Define the permissions for the objects as you define the objects.
   • Define data forms and criteria for data export and create the requests in these forms required by the functionality.
   • Create external support files and add them to the application.
   • Test the functionality as you create it using the test users.
   • You can also create packing lists to organize groups of application objects during development.
7. Define entry points to appear in application lists.
8. Optionally, define access points to indicate to developers where external workflow should access the application.
9. Define help text for the application or create external help files and add them to the application.
10. Optionally, configure the application or some of its forms to record statistics.
11. Export the application, import it to a different AR System server development or test server, define the required groups, users, and role mappings, and test the application.
12. After the application functionality and its deployment are tested successfully, import the application to the production server, define the required groups, add the group to the Group List for the users, and define the role mappings and application state.