Before you begin, you must complete Exercise 1.1: Setup.
In the previous exercise, we created the AuctionPortlet project to contain the portlets that will be developed in this tutorial. To prepare for creating the user interface and adding data to specific Faces portlets, we will define the application flow using the Web Diagram editor. A Web diagram is only one method for defining the application flow, but it is especially suited for visual development of Faces-based portlet applications.
A Web diagram is a file that helps you visualize and change the flow of a Web application such as a Faces or Struts-based portlet application. The Web diagram editor is a visual editor for editing Web diagrams. When you add nodes, connections, and other components to a Web diagram, it is referred to generically as drawing the diagram.
A Web diagram consists of nodes and connections between nodes. A node is an icon that represents a resource such as a portlet JSP page or a JavaTM bean. If the resource exists, the node is called realized; if the resource does not exist, the node is called unrealized. Realized nodes are shown in color with their names in boldface. Unrealized nodes are shown as gray icons.
We will add three JSP nodes to the Web diagram. One will be considered a master node, which will allow the navigation to two linked details nodes.
The file will open in the editing pane with some instructions about how to use the Web diagram editor.
To create the first node, you can drag UserAdminView.jsp, the initial JSP view page created with the AuctionPortlet project, from the Project Explorer to the editor. Because this file has already been created, it is displayed as a realized object.
Note: You can drag the nodes to re-position them.
The links that have been defined will prime the portlet pages with the proper linkages, so that user-initiated data will flow through the application properly. When the UserAdminView page requests a user creation or update action, the appropriate form is opened. After the necessary information is submitted by these forms, the new user information becomes available to the UserAdmin portlet query function.
Now you are ready to begin Exercise 1.3: Developing the UserAdmin page.