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How to create support for your own framework in ORM Designer, part I – basic XML configuration

Introduction

Currently there exists a batch of smaller, rising or corporate ORM frameworks which can also benefit from ORM Designer. In next parts of this serial we are going to show how to easily implement a support for an own framework in ORM Designer.

The whole implementation is very simple and customizable. Configuration consists of settings of several configuration XML files, implementation of XSLT templates for data import and export from ORM Designer format into ORM framework native data and writing scripts that process the single steps and these configuration (the script arises from the syntax of script language Phing).

In these articles we are going to describe how to create a support for imaginary framework AtomixORM. Step by step we are going to show the implementation of required parts for allowing ORM Designer to work with target ORM.

In following page is available several documents concerning ORM Designer file structure, a work with configuration repository etc. http://www.orm-designer.com/tag/developers

Part I: create basic XML configuration for our framework.

We start with a creation of basic configuration file AtomixOrm.cfg.xml. We place it to a user’s configuration repository (more information you can find in the article Configuration files location and validation), which is in this directory:

%User_Application_Data%\OrmDesignerCore\config\AtomixORM

We are assuming that besides ORM you have also some MVC framework which this ORM uses. In our case we call the MVC framework as AtomixMVC. Hence, we write into our configuration file the following code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<orm-designer-configuration>
  <framework-configuration name="AtomixMVC">
		<supported-orm  name="AtomixORM"/>
	</framework-configuration>
  <orm-configuration name="AtomixORM">
	</orm-configuration>
</orm-designer-configuration>

By this code we define our AtomixMVC and AtomixORM. Now if you restart ORM Designer you should see the following screen during new project creation.

Note: For more information about the single elements and its all allowed attributes look at XML schema for configuration files - configuration.xsd. This and other schemata for all types of XML files are available in an application directory in subdirectory Schema (i.e.: “c:\Program Files (x86)\OrmDesignerCore\Schema”).

If you have any question about this or following chapter, don’t hesitate and ask us directly here on the blog or you can contact us at [email protected].

25 Aug 2010