Transformation of Coghead customer applications to WOLF Platform...

Welcome to the world of executable XML. Here are a few observations from our Coghead application conversion process for customer applications.

1] Transformation from the Coghead Application XML to Wolf Entity Tree: Coghead used hierarchichal and relational structuring of data which converts into a pure relational model in WOLF. Each of the Collections are identified and the equivalent data structures are created in WOLF. Collections having lists generate separate Entities to hold the data for these lists. All collections of data including lists are treated as entities in Wolf. Collections having Detail Grids are converted into equivalent Gridwidgets in WOLF and Master Detail Relations are established. Linked fields are also created.

The Coghead XML shows that they had the capability of having multiple Collections with the Same Root level names. In WOLF this is an area of conflict and the import transformations fail to distinguish the Entities in such scenarios. The WOLF team here has taken some manual effort to make slight alterations to the Root level names before providing it to the Import Routines.

2] Transformation of Coghead Actions to WOLF Business Rules: Coghead actions convert to business rules easily inside WOLF. The algorithmic structure of the Actions is captured. Expression formats used by Coghead do not import as there is a lot of string manipulation involved in this process. For reasonably sized projects it might be quicker to reconstruct the expressions using the WOLF business rules interface. Simple expressions that can find equivalence in WOLF have been picked up automatically.

3] Transformation of tabs: Each Tab/Form in Coghead is a navigation item for WOLF. WOLF does not create a tab per form but creates multiple screens per entities. The types of screens that we have are Data Views (also referred to as search screens), Edit screens, Report Screens, Chart Screens, Dashboard Screens etc. There could be multiple screens associated to a single Entity. A “Navigation Item” then opens up a single screen. As an output of the transformation, there is a Navigation Item for each View in Coghead. The Editable forms are linked to the Search Screen.

So, in Simple terms: Navigation Item  Linked to Search Screen  Linked to Entity Editable Form Screen.

4] Data Imports: Data imports deal with complex mapping structures. For the import of simple non related data WOLF’s import program generates simple business rules which handles mapping of data when the data XML’s are uploaded.