Eclipse Scout: Migration Guide

The following changes were made after the initial 7.1 release (Eclipse Photon release). Additionally follow these instructions when updating to a service release.

The required Java Runtime Environment (JRE) to run an Eclipse Scout application has changed: Starting with Eclipse Scout 7.1, a Java 8 runtime is required.

To reflect this change, some existing Scout classes have been migrated to the newly available Java 8 classes:

Removed deprecated method Date[] getCoveredDays() on org.eclipse.scout.rt.client.ui.basic.calendar.CalendarComponent.

Migration: Use Range<Date> getCoveredDaysRange() instead with start and end date.

The methods SequenceBox#getConfiguredEqualColumnWidths(), SequenceBox#isEqualColumnWidths() and SequenceBox#setEqualColumnWidths() have been deprecated. As this property was not used by Scout since several releases it can be deleted.

You can search for these method names in your code to find any usages. Alternatively your IDE may mark the usage of deprecated methods (depends on settings).

Since the new Html UI was introduced with Scout 5.2 some constants and methods in ClientUIPreferences had no effect on the UI anymore. Since Scout is now a browser application we don’t have any control over the application window anymore. The form bounds are stored in the local browser storage thus they’re not required in the Java model anymore.

The following constants/methods were dropped:

Since the new Html UI was introduced with Scout 5.2 the property focusable had no effect on the UI anymore. Instead the UI uses sensible defaults for each field type. For instance: a LabelField is never focusable, a normal StringField is always focusable, as long as it is enabled. Since the property was rarely used, we removed the related code:

Migration: Since there is no replacement for the focusable property, remove all code that uses one of the methods/properties listed above.

In Scout 7.0 a new smart field implementation named SmartField2 was created. The old implementation was still available, but its use was discouraged. With Scout 7.1 the old SmartField implementation was finally dropped. The new implementation SmartField2 was renamed back to SmartField.

The following table lists the different names used in the past Scout releases. (The naming applies to all associated files, such as interfaces, abstract field classes, Java packages and JavaScript and LESS files.)

Migration:

The base class and interfaces of the old SmartField implementation was IContentAssistField. With the new SmartField implementation this interfaces and all classes containing the word "ContentAssist" in their name, have been either removed or renamed to "SmartField". If your code references one of these classes you should simply try to rename all references. Since the API of the new SmartField is almost the same as the old, this should work and should cause no or few changes in your code. The following classes have been removed without replacement:

Since the new SmartField implementation does not have a proposal chooser model anymore these classes have also been removed. If you must have a special implementation of a proposal chooser, you must implement a proposal chooser in JavaScript (see: ProposalChooser.js), which renders the data and lookup rows it receives from the server-side SmartField. The following classes have been removed without replacement:

The property minWidthInPixel has been moved to LogicalGridLayoutConfig.

Migration: Instead of using getConfiguredMinWidthInPixel you should now set the property as follows:

The goal was to harmonize all the init methods (initField, initTile, initForm etc.) and to make sure, init() is only executed once. This is important for dynamic widgets like accordion or tiles. These widgets initialize the newly added children by themselves so that the caller does not need to take care of it. For these cases it is important that init() is not called multiple times.

But: there may be cases which require init() to be called multiple times, like reseting a search form. For such cases, reinit() has to be used from now on. Also, after the widget is disposed, init() may be called again. So remember: execInit may be called more than once in some circumstances. This is existing behavior!

We also renamed the initConfig guard of IFormField from isInitialized to isInitDone to make clear what initialization has been done. It has furthermore been moved to AbstractWidget so that individual widgets don’t have to care about it and to use the same pattern as for init and dispose.

These new methods (init(), dispose() and reinit()) handle the whole widget tree including all child widgets recursively. Child items that need initialization and are NO widgets must be initialized explicitly as it is already now. All children that are widgets must NOT be initialized because this is done automatically by the AbstractWidget implementation. To modify that behavior use the methods initChildren() or disposeChildren() (e.g. if you want to exclude a child widget from automatically getting initialized). This also means that the methods ActionUtility.initActions(), ActionUtility.disposeActions(), FormUtility.postInitConfig(), FormUtility.initFormFields() and FormUtility.disposeFormFields() have been removed because the corresponding method can be called directly on the instance instead. Use widget.init() or widget.dispose() instead of these utility functions.

Please note that the phase postInit has been removed for the items that supported it. The corresponding code can be moved to the end of the initConfigInternal() method instead.

We also renamed the initConfig guard of IFormField from isInitialized to isInitDone to make clear what initialization has been done. It has furthermore been moved to AbstractWidget so that individual widgets don’t have to care about it and to use the same pattern as for init and dispose.

Migration:

If you used one of the deprecated methods (initField, initAction etc.), replace them with one of the following methods: init, reinit or initInternal.

Replaced init parameters get_pattern and post_pattern with content_types. If you set these init parameters in your web.xml, replace or remove them accordingly.

The argument pathInfo has been removed from the method HttpCacheControl.checkAndSetCacheHeaders since it has no effect anymore.

HTTP Proxy doesn’t set cache control no-chache header anymore.

A new tree visitor engine has been added to the org.eclipse.scout.rt.platform.util.visitor package. It contains classes to depth-first or breadth-first traverse any tree data structures. Use the class org.eclipse.scout.rt.platform.util.visitor.TreeTraversals as entry point.

This new visitors can be used on any widget and tree node. It replaces the former IActionVisitor, ITreeVisitor and IFormFieldVisitor. The org.eclipse.scout.rt.client.ui.IWidget interface also declares various overloads accepting java.util.function.Consumer, java.util.function.Function and the new org.eclipse.scout.rt.platform.util.visitor.IDepthFirstTreeVisitor and org.eclipse.scout.rt.platform.util.visitor.IBreadthFirstTreeVisitor. Depending on how much control and data you need for your visitor the matching type can be used.

Until now only pre-order visitors have been available on these items. Therefore the migration to the new visitor takes the following steps:

There are new methods for setting mandatory state (setMandatory), status visibility (setStatusVisible), field style (setFieldStyle) and disabled style (setDisabledStyle) that allow to specify if child form fields should be changed as well.

So if you have overridden one of these methods in your code, please override the new one instead. The method now takes an additional boolean flag to indicate if children should be processed as well.

The new config property scout.cspDirective makes subclassing and replacing the ContentSecurityPolicy class obsolete as you can configure all CSP settings with this property now. An example from the Scout Widgets application:

This class was deleted and replaced by a config property in config.properties:

The methods handleGet and handlePost on IUiServletRequestHandler were replaced by the single method handle. This new method is called for all HTTP methods.

To retrieve the HTTP method, call getMethod on HttpServletRequest. When using AbstractUiServletRequestHandler no migration should be required because AbstractUiServletRequestHandler delegates to the Java methods for the common HTTP methods handleGet, handlePost, handlePut and handleDelete.

Methods proxyGet and proxyPost on HttpProxy are replaced by the common method proxy.

We removed remnants of the long-obsolete "population" event in tables:

Migration: Remove any references to the removed method or event from your code. (This should not cause any change in behavior, as the event was not fired by Scout anyways.)

The table field contained in a PageField used to have statusVisible set to false. This default was changed back to true to make it consistent with all other fields. Whether the status should be invisible can only be determined correctly by the programmer, because the PageField can not know about the status visibility in the inner forms (search form and search form).

Migration: To hide the status of a specific PageField's table field, override execInitField() and set the desired status visibility:

If you created a custom theme, you might have to adjust some LESS variables.

The clone() function of any widget got an options parameter. The options define what properties and events are synchronized between the widget and its clone.

The methods addChild() and removeChild() have been renamed to _addChild() and _removeChild(). This means the methods are considered to have private visibility now. Use the methods setParent(), setOwner() and destroy() to connect or disconnect widgets. These methods will add or remove the child widget automatically.

The visit() method on all FormFields has been renamed to visitFields(). This change is necessary to clarify what is visited and to distinguish between the visit methods available on widget level (e.g. visitChildren()).

The argument order of the method scout.Tree.visitNodes have changed from (nodes, func, parentNode) to (func, nodes, parentNode). So the func (the visitor) and the nodes to visit have changed positions.

The arguments of scout.Tree.prototype._visitNodes have changed from (nodes, func, parentNode) to (func, parentNode). So the nodes to visit must no longer be specified. Instead always the root nodes of the tree are used. Furthermore the method is public now and has therefore be renamed to visitNodes().

Scout can now detect the Web Fonts (*.woff files) to preload automatically. It’s therefore no longer necessary to list the font names manually in the bootstrap argument of scout.App.

Migration:

Remove the fonts property from the bootstrap parameter object passed to the init() function of your Scout app.

For example, the default index.js file generated by the Scout "helloworld" archetype looks like this:

If no other init options remain, the file can be simplified to:

This migration is recommended but optional. Listing all fonts to preload manually still works. To disable font preloading entirely, set the fonts bootstrap property to an empty array [].

Until now it was required to explicitly set grid positions for child fields of Radio Button Groups and Sequence Boxes. This was because the automatic grid layout was not yet implemented in the Scout JavaScript layer. This was no issue however if the fields have been used in connection with a Java model because then the Java layer takes care about the layout.

Now also pure JavaScript Scout applications have automatic layout for child fields of Radio Button Groups and Sequence Boxes. So if explicit grid positions (gridData.x, gridData.y) have been specified, it can be removed now as Scout takes care about it now (as it was in the Java layer already).