After the Agentry Editor plug-in has been installed has been installed to Eclipse there are configuration tasks to be accomplished. All tasks are performed from within the Eclipse Platform itself. These tasks relate to several areas of the Agentry Editor and its management of application projects.
The information provided concerning these configuration tasks should be considered a recommended best practice. For a particular development environment, different options or configurations can be implemented based on need. Contributing factors and items of consideration include the overall uses for the Eclipse implementation.
The Data Tools Platform (DTP) is a project for the Eclipse platform that provides several powerful tools for work with different data sources. The Agentry Editor leverages the power of this project by extending the tools provided in the Connectivity DTP subproject with the Agentry Connector Studio.
The Agentry Connector Studio is a tool within the Agentry Editor plug-in that allows for the development of object, transaction, and step definitions using the available schema information of a data source. When an Oracle or SQL Server database system is that data source there is some configuration needed within certain Connectivity components. Specifically, connections must be configured to these database systems in order to access this schema information.
The configuration of a connection includes the creation of a Driver Definition and a Connection Profile within the Connectivity tools. The procedure provided on configuring these items will be an example on configuring these tools for the Agentry Editor. For complete information on all configuration options as well as descriptions on the functionality and uses for these tools see the Eclipse.org website.
If the application being developed or configured includes a Java Virtual Machine system connection, a Java project should be created within the Eclipse platform. This project should include the Agentry Java API version 5, as well as any other needed resources to properly build the Java logic for the mobile application’s data synchronization. This will also expose the data members of the Java resources to be used to the Agentry Connector Studio. This will then allow for objects, transactions, synchronization steps, and properties to be defined based on the information provided by the Java packages in the Java project.
This process is performed using the Eclipse New Java Project wizard. The new Java project can be created before or after the Agentry application project is created, but does require the Agentry Development Server to be installed and accessible to the host system of the Eclipse platform, as this location includes the Agentry Java API JAR file to be used in the Java project.
An Agentry application project can contain several different file types as a part of the project definitions. These can include scripts for SQL, batch files, and shell scripts, Java source files, bitmap files and large markup files related to XML processing. Configuration of the Eclipse Platform and the tools outside of, but still used by the Agentry Editor plug-in for Eclipse, can be needed in order for these different files to be handled correctly.
Also, most of the above mentioned files are stored as text files, with the obvious exception being bitmap files for image definitions. The encoding of these text files when created by the Agentry Editor is a unicode format of UTF-16. Files for other purposes outside of the Agentry application project may not be encoded in this format. Therefore the configuration related to file encoding must be performed in a manner that supports the different file encoding formats that may be needed.