FWD » Core Development » User Interface

There are 3 high priority changes needed for the embedded web client's javascript upcalls:

1. To the degree that these calls are not fully secured on the Java side (integrated with our security manager infrastructure and plugins), we need to add this.

2. We need to move the parameter passing conversion and management back into the runtime. Instead of writing ABL code to consume or generate JSON, we should be automatically translating parameters (input, input-output and output) into a single JSON return object. Each parameter would have objects at the top level and it should be smart about how to convert each type, extents and so forth. We should handle the simple and extent BDT cases. But just as important is the temp-table case. The idea is that the ABL should not have to know that it was called by javascript, we should be able to handle the JSON creation completely in the runtime.

3. I also would like to make sure we do safety checking of all inputs and ensure that only safe values will be translated to ABL types. Any problems detected should cause the upcall to be rejected without abending.

Eric also had the idea about trying to make it easy to implement bidirectional data binding.

When using something like D3, the toolset makes it easy to bind your UI to JSON data. It would be very powerful to enable birdirectional updates so that changes on the web side could be pushed back to the ABL easily.

To provide the best solution for the auto-JSON creation, we would want to allow ABL OO class graphs and prodatasets to be handled cleanly. These both provide non-trivial data structuring options that are natural for ABL programmers. Fully enabling these will allow these data structures to be properly reflected down to the web client.