Jiwa

Whilst I know how to add additional forms to Jiwa that use Maintenance for a Business Logic object and Process action etc in a plugin are then any unique steps in being able to do this from inside a DLL or Class library other than the following

Create a lass library
Reference the necessary Jiwa DLLs
Create a form inside the DLL that is puiblic
Add the form to Jiwa through forms maintenance

No - no different to the form being defined within a plugin - it just needs to implement the IJiwaForm interface in order to be instantiated using our FormFactory.

Thanks Mike,

The problem starts to come from when you have a number of forms and classes for business logic etc in a plugin, the number of lines of code starts to reach the unmanageable stage for everything being in the one source file which happens with a plugin.

SBarnes wrote:Thanks Mike,

The problem starts to come from when you have a number of forms and classes for business logic etc in a plugin, the number of lines of code starts to reach the unmanageable stage for everything being in the one source file which happens with a plugin.

Which is why I've split my code up into multiple plugins that reference each other.

So, I have a 'Sales Order' library with common SalesOrder-ry stuff, and then a general 'SalesOrder UI', plus a "Sales Order Info Panel" (based off one of the sample plugins).

It works well, except that you have to be careful of dependencies - I've managed to introduce circular dependencies which have taken me a while to figure out.

Hi Ryan

that may work in limited scenarios but when you use a custom forms there is a lot of code that ends up being needed to hook up events etc and no matter how good the functionality inside Jiwa is, and Jiwa would leave leave many other ERPs for dead not only in terms of integration options but professionalism on response times etc, Jiwa is never going to compete with Visual Studio for functionality.

I do almost all of my development in Visual Studio.

It's a bit of 'admin overhead', but it works well for me.

I always create a new plugin within Jiwa, so that it has all its supporting infrastructure.

For minor things, I just copy-and-paste between VS and JIWA.

For more complicated things, I have a little Access database that I use to extract the plugins into a folder. The filenames are <Plugin-Name>.vb|.cs. It can also read them back in.

I have a separate folder that is my VB project folder (and/or a C# project folder).

For a new project, I'd just copy 'from JIWA to VS'.

Otherwise, I use WinMerge to compare what's in Jiwa with what's in Visual Studio, and update as necessary. This works both ways, so I can make changes in either, or both, and synchronise them pretty quickly.

The main trick I figured out that make it easier was to put each of my plugin modules in its own namespace. That way, I can have them all in the same project without them getting conflicting names. And it also allows you to get a handle on the references between plugins.

Hi Ryan,

That's an interesting approach it would certainly be helpful if there was a better way of integrating between Visual Studio and Jiwa's plugin maintenance module as most things still rely on a fair amount of cut and paste.

SBarnes wrote:Hi Ryan,

That's an interesting approach it would certainly be helpful if there was a better way of integrating between Visual Studio and Jiwa's plugin maintenance module as most things still rely on a fair amount of cut and paste.

There was some discussion around supporting source control (e.g. GIT) from within JIWA; that would probably be a good place to drive the discussion from - if you could get JIWA and Visual Studio to share a (local) GIT repository, then you could push-and-pull between them. The structure would probably need to be different than what I'm doing but that would be fine.

pricerc wrote:
There was some discussion around supporting source control (e.g. GIT) from within JIWA; that would probably be a good place to drive the discussion from - if you could get JIWA and Visual Studio to share a (local) GIT repository, then you could push-and-pull between them. The structure would probably need to be different than what I'm doing but that would be fine.

Hi Ryan,

I don't disagree that it would be good to interface things that way and it would also be helpful if in some way the structure of a visual studio project was supported, unfortunately I am not the one you need to convince.

I don't know about you but I would also be willing to to devote some time and effort to help making it happen even in some sort of community effort if it was going to make working with Jiwa easier given I have just completed a massive project of updating a client with a lot of customisations and this would have certainly made that easier.

Mike already raised https://service.jiwa.com.au/browse/DEV-7226 for this.

Perhaps we could create a specific thread here to discuss options on how to handle it. I know I've had a few ideas.

I have to head out to see a customer; If nobody beats me to it, I'll take some action when I get back in a few hours.