4.3.2 Reusable Part
Component technology is designed to provide productivity, quality and consistency gains by centering the development effort on the creation of standard, reusable, automated building blocks, called reusable parts, from which applications are assembled. As much of the maintenance is carried out at the reusable part level, the time required in testing and verifying individual applications is also greatly reduced.
A typical Visual LANSA application is built from a number of reusable parts defined in the repository, such as lists, fields and standard dialogs. You can change an individual reusable part and this change is reflected in every application that uses the component—the applications themselves do not need to be changed or recompiled. For example you could change the label of a reusable part and this change would be reflected immediately in every application where the button is used.
Reusable parts allow you to define components that can be reused in many different applications. It is like using any other component such as a push button. A reusable part presents to the outside world as:
- - which you can set and get just like the properties associated with a push button.
- - which you can invoke to request that the part performs some activity.
- - which you can monitor for so that you are notified when something significant happens within the reusable part.
Reusable Parts can be used whenever you suspect that the logic you are going to create can be simplified, standardized and reused in more than one form.
Note that you cannot execute a reusable part in isolation. It has to be imbedded in a 4.3.1 Form before you can observe and test its operation.
Also See