Thursday, July 17, 2008

Flex and Java application with LCDS (LiveCycle Data Services) without server side code

LCDS 2.5 brought a new assembler, SQLAssembler. SQLAssembler lets you connect your Flex client to your database. Usually, when you read/write data with LCDS, you create your own Java adapter to handle these operations. With SQLAssembler, instead of writing the Java code for accessing the database, you configure access to the database and write the SQL for read/write/delete directly into the data-management-config.xml file (this is a configuration file used by Flex data services). Basically, you write some simple XML with some SQL for each operation, and you don’t need to write a single line of Java. But, you get a full CRUD application, with all the benefits of Flex Data Services: collaboration, conflict resolution, paging. If you need for some operations to use stored procedure instead of SQL statements, there is no problem as SQLAssemberl has support for them.

Why should you use SQLAssembler?

I will not try to fool you. Probably it isn’t good for complex applications, where you have a lot of business logic on your server. But, it could come in very handy when you need to create a simple application, maybe a quick prototype for example. And the best thing is that if, for some reason, you decide that you need a custom assembler or HibernateAssembler instead of SQLAssembler, there should be little to change in the Flex client code, if anything at all. And, as you will see in this article, I can use this assembler to create a full CRUD application for one-to-many relationship database setup.

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