Chapter 4 Managing Profiles

Defining Forms in a Profile

A form is a user-defined property tab or dialog box associated with a metaclass, a stereotype or a criterion. Building a new form is fast and easy: you do not have to type the code corresponding to the controls in the form, you can use a set of control tools for creating and organizing the form content.

Benefits of creating a property tab

By default, extended attributes appear in a list in the Extended Attributes tab of a property sheet. This list is not always the best way to present extended attributes as it gathers heterogeneous attributes in alphabetical order. You can use additional property tabs to improve extended attributes presentation and make it easier to enter their values.

You can create a property tab when you need to address the following issues:

You have a very large list of extended attributes; you can display them in different property tabs with a meaningful title in order to retrieve them easily.
Extended attributes are of very heterogeneous types and need to be organized logically instead of alphabetically.
Extended attributes are related and need to be grouped together in order to clearly indicate their dependency link.
You need to define the extended attribute value using the appropriate editor.

Benefits of creating a dialog box

You create an additional dialog box when you want to type parameters during the execution of a method. For example, you want to be able to type a generation path during the execution of an extended generation.

You can also use additional dialog boxes to complement new property tabs as explained in the example developed further in this chapter.