Design Environment for Experts

The design environment for Experts is in the context of projects in Design Center, primarily with the Expert Editor, which is similar to the environment for process flows: a graph in which task objects are represented by icons, flow of control is represented by connecting lines, and design activities are performed by drag-and-drop and setting up object properties. Tasks can include creating or modifying objects in your projects, invoking commonly used built-in dialogs, creating custom dialog boxes, and invoking OMB*Plus scripts for complex flow of control and interaction with OWB. Variables are available to preserve state among tasks in an Expert. Nested Experts are also supported, so that logic implemented in one Expert can be called in others.

Experts can also invoke arbitrary Java code in JAR files that you set up to be loaded with Warehouse Builder. As a result, you can implement new functionality in Java and integrate it into the Warehouse Builder user interface.

At runtime, Experts follow the same paradigm as traditional OWB functionality, in that code (in this case, OMB and OMU scripts) is generated from the model/logical design, and is then executed.