Introduction

When developing a web application, it typically becomes a full project requiring a team of staff to be involved. It may take several months, and the development costs are far from inexpensive.

With Sharperlight installed, Foundry empowers you to develop web applications quickly and efficiently — even a single person or a small team can create a full set of input screens and reports in a short time.

In this post, we’ll walk through the steps to create a simple web application using Sharperlight Foundry.

Practices

Designing the application

Open Foundry from Sharperlight Application menu.

This is Foundry. Product tab is shown with the default options.

Now, let’s start creating a web application.

Preparing its data

Sometimes you need initial data loaded when the application is deployed. Foundry supports this by building the feature into the datamodel it generates.

Preparing SQL Scripts

We prepared this SQL Scripts here.

USE [AustralianCompany]
GO
INSERT [dbo].[States] ([Code], [Name], [Description]) VALUES (N'WA', N'Western Australia', N'Australia')
INSERT [dbo].[States] ([Code], [Name], [Description]) VALUES (N'NSW', N'New South Wales', N'Australia')
INSERT [dbo].[Cities] ([Code], [Name], [Description], [State_ID]) VALUES (N'PER', N'Perth', N'Capital of Western Australia', 1)
INSERT [dbo].[Cities] ([Code], [Name], [Description], [State_ID]) VALUES (N'SYD', N'Sydney', N'Capital of New South Wales', 2)

Foundry Post-Process

We place the SQL scripts into Post-Process option in the Foundry definition.

Save and Execute

The Application Design Is Now Complete.

Save the design by clicking Save button.

Then click Execute to generate the database, the datamodel, a set of reports in Publisher and insert the predefined dataset.

While Foundry generates the objects, it logs its actions, and you can view the log.

You will be notified if any errors are detected.

The final message dialog opens as soon as the process is completed.

Click No for close, and click Yes if you want to see the generated files.

At the same time as the final message is displayed, the generated dashboard page for the new application is displayed.

The dashboard page should display correctly if you run Foundry as Administrator. This is because the Sharperlight service restarts properly during the generation process when launched with administrator privileges.

If you run Foundry as normal user, please restart the Sharperlight service manually and refresh the dashboard page if required.

The generated dataset is displayed as you can see here.

Verification

The database is created in the database server where Sharperlight system database is in.

The Datamodel is also created here.

A set of reports is also in Publisher.

Do you remember we set “Cascading” Option for “States” field and “Cities” field in the Statistics table design.

It makes that the Cities dropdown list holds the list of cities which belong to the State chosen with the States Dropdown list.

Afterword

In this post, we’ve shown how to create a web application using Foundry. We hope you found it easy to configure the various settings through Foundry’s user interface.

Most of these settings — with the exception of database creation — can also be configured when manually creating a datamodel.

In a future post, we’ll explain the relationships between these options and how specific Foundry settings map to datamodel attributes.