Book Image

Rapid Application Development with OutSystems

By : Ricardo Pereira
Book Image

Rapid Application Development with OutSystems

By: Ricardo Pereira

Overview of this book

OutSystems is a software development platform that speeds up the build phase by abstracting code and making almost everything visual. This means replacing textual language with visual artifacts that avoid lexical errors and speed up code composition using accelerators and predefined templates. The book begins by walking you through the fundamentals of the technology, along with a general overview of end-to-end web and mobile software development. You'll learn how to configure your personal area in the cloud and use the OutSystems IDE to connect with it. The book then shows you how to build a web application based on the best architectural and developmental practices in the market, and takes the same approach for the mobile paradigm. As you advance, you'll find out how to develop the same application, and the great potential of reusing code from one paradigm in another and the symbiosis between them is showcased.The only application that'll differ from the application in the exercise is the one used in business process technology (BPT), with a focus on a common market use case. By the end of this OutSystems book, you'll be able to develop enterprise-level applications on the web and mobile, integrating them with third parties and other systems on the market. You'll also understand the concepts of performance, security, and software construction and be able to apply them effectively.
Table of Contents (21 chapters)
1
Section 1: OutSystems 101
5
Section 2: The Magical Path of the Backend
10
Section 3: Create Value and Innovate with the Frontend
16
Section 4: Extensibility and Complexity of the OutSystems Platform

Events to propagate changes from a block to the parent

We can develop our frontend in pages or blocks. The latter are considered groupings of certain features and samples that live in their own lifecycle and with their own scope and can be reused within other blocks and/or screens. Direct or indirect recursion using blocks is not possible, that is, a block has an instance of itself in its content.

Since a block has its own scope, in order to communicate with its parent, be it another block or a screen, you need to trigger events to do so. These same events can carry data, defined as input variables.

When we define an event in a certain block, if it has its Is Mandatory property set to Yes, the parents of that block must define a handler, which can be a screen action or another event, to respond to the change made to the child block.

Tip

If you want to see a brief explanation and example of how to set up an event and its handler between a block and a parent, you can see...