1) the concept is reversed. you use the widgets and ftl's for UI. They are entity aware. The visual is controlled by css, after the basic generation. Once an entity or entity view is defined the page will generate the data. if you change the entityview you don't have to change the UI. The new data gets added by defualt.
2) start here for info. http://docs.ofbiz.org/display/OFBADMIN/OFBiz+Documentation+Index as far as integration of legacy systems that keep running with other input, I suggest you create a Delegator that incorporates youre datasource. then have ofbiz webtools create the entities for you. after dressing them up a bit put your entities you you application. you can then use services to keep the two in sync thru secas BTW this is not an official ofbiz stance but just my opinion. Peter Felts sent the following on 1/24/2008 5:14 PM: > I'm learning OfBiz and I'm at the point where I've gone through the basic > tutorials provided by opensourcestrategies.com, but now I've got some > conceptual questions that I'm hoping the ofBiz community could help me with. > Any insight into these topics would be greatly appreciated! Thanks. > > 1) I am used to programming web interfaces in PHP. In a typical PHP > application I would store transaction data in an object or array. Lets say > that we've got an order object which is not to be placed in the database > until the order has been placed. In PHP I would serialize a the object as a > session variable, load it at the beginning of each script, then reserialize > it before posting to another page. My first conceptual OfBiz question is > this: what is the standard method of storing temporary data such as this? Do > I store everything in a DB during simple UI transactions? > > 2) Where can I learn about the entity data types and how they map to data > types in the particular database system I'm using? > > Thanks everyone. > > > > >
