Woof! - Generating stubs

Generating stubs

Our simple web site will have only two pages - one to generate the Fibonacci number sequence and a help page.

Although we could create all the required files manually, we'll save a bit of work by using the Woof! application generator wag. If you are using bowwow.exe, this is built into the program:

C:\fibo> bowwow url fibonacci/generate fibonacci/help

If you are not using bowwow.exe, wag has to be invoked as a script:

~/fibo> tclsh scripts/wag.tcl url fibonacci/generate fibonacci/help

Invoking either of the above commands will result in the following output:

C:\fibo> bowwow url fibonacci/generate fibonacci/help
Controller FibonacciController:
         File app/controllers/fibonacci_controller.tcl will be created.
         Class FibonacciController will be created.
         Methods to be added: generate, help.
         View stubs to be added:
                app/controllers/views/fibonacci-generate-main.wtf
                app/controllers/views/fibonacci-help-main.wtf
Do you want to continue? [YN] y
Created file app/controllers/fibonacci_controller.tcl
Created class FibonacciController.
Created action FibonacciController.generate.
Created action FibonacciController.help.
Created view app/controllers/views/fibonacci-generate-main.wtf.
Created view app/controllers/views/fibonacci-help-main.wtf.

The url command generates stubs for the specified relative URL(s). So the above commands will generate stubs for Web pages accessed through /fibonacci/generate and /fibonacci/help on our web site.

The url command will first display the actions it will take in creating the stubs, and then prompt for the go-ahead to actually do so. In this Quick Start chapter, we will ignore the MVC-based naming conventions being used when generating the stubs. It suffices to know that the stub generator will create a class FibonacciController whose methods will be called to handle URL's that are prefixed with /fibonacci. The stub generator also creates two methods - generate and help - corresponding to the two URL's we specified on the command line.

If you edit the file app/controllers/fibonacci_controller.tcl under your BowWow directory, you will see the following contents:

oo::class create FibonacciController {
    superclass ApplicationController
    constructor args {
        # Very important to pass arguments to parent
        next {*}$args
    }
}
oo::define FibonacciController {
    method generate {} {
        # Raise an exception that allows woofer to detect unimplemented actions
        ::woof::errors::exception WOOF NotImplemented "Action generate has no supporting implementation."
    }
    method help {} {
        # Raise an exception that allows woofer to detect unimplemented actions
        ::woof::errors::exception WOOF NotImplemented "Action help has no supporting implementation."
    }
}

As you can see, the stubs will generate exceptions if invoked. For example, navigating to http://localhost:8015/fibonacci/help will result in an error page being displayed in the browser.

First steps Implementing the stubs

Web Oriented Object Framework

User Guide (Version 0.5b4)

Generating stubs