Functionally Complete Crud Generator

In my previous post I wrote about the Irreducible Complexity Model ….now why is that model so important?

Well, for a Crud Generator to be functionally complete it has to fulfill the following requirements:

1. Be able to generated the Crud Screens for the Irreducible Complexity Model
2. It should be possible to “capture” the entire “model graph” as a single transaction starting from any node in the graph
3. It should be possible to “skip” validation until the “save” button of the screen to save the node where we started is clicked, and, it should be easy to go from there to any of the screens used to edit the other nodes to fix any validation error.
4. It should be possible to search for instances (rows?) of the entity (class, table?) by using a “query by example” node graph that can be built using one or all of the nodes of the model with any arbitrary depth.

With this rules, I realize that the only functionally complete crud generator that I have seen was Apple WebObjects Direct2Web… All others (JBoss SeamGen for example) are unable to deal with all the kinds of relationships in the Irreducible Complexity Model and, even without that limitation, are just unable to deal with requirements 2,3, and 4. because all of them force you to either violate transactionality by forcing you to save before navigation to the next node, or force you to pass all validation rules at a particular node before going to the next, or, have a really simple and powerless query by example UI.