GWT Integration to the Flowsheet Module

As mentioned in my previous post, during the second week of coding, I started figuring out the way to integrate GoogleWebToolkit(GWT) to the Flowsheet module. As I expected, it was a challenging task since I needed to find out the integration points. My thanks to my mentor Sy and the OpenMRS developer Daniel Kayiwa. Daniel has already done some work related to GWT in his Xform module. I am happy that I could find out the way to integrate GWT. Thanks to the folks at ##gwt IRC as well. I have written the details about the integration in the module wiki page. Here I will talk more about the problems I faced and how I managed to solve them.

I faced two major problems during the integration:

1. I used a div tag id "flowsheet" in the GWT UI code to get the RootPane. But since my module name is "flowsheet", there was already a div tag defined with the id "flowsheet". When I used the same id in the JSP to hold the GWT UI, there was a conflict and the GWT was not rendered properly. When I inspected via Firebug, I found that the content window retrieved by the new div area was null. But I couldn't figure out at the first try that the name duplication was the actual cause for the problem. While going through the generated code observed in Firebug, I found that there was already a div area with that name. When I changed the name of the new div area, in to some other name, it worked fine.

2. After reading the documentations, I came to know that the servlets under the web/src of a module can be accessed via http:/moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService. But I took sometime to figure out the format of the URI parameter for the @RemoteServiceRelativePath annotation of the RemoteService interface. The @RemoteServiceRelativePath annotation specifies the relative path of the Service. In this case, the compiled GWT code resides under . So if the relative path is given as /moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService, it will end up with
http://localhost:8080/openmrs/moduleResources/flowsheet/generated-folder/moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService. To avoid that, the location ../../../moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService is used. This will end up in the correct location of the service :
http://localhost:8080/openmrs/moduleServlet/flowsheet/flowsheetService

My next task is to decide on the UI objects to be represented in the client side of GWT. I have already started working on designing a class diagram for this purpose.

The first group of GSoC students presented their project progress during the developer call on last Thursday. This week is the turn for the students belong to the second group. I belong to the second group and eagerly waiting for this Thursday to present my progress to the OpenMRS developer community. I am sure that it will bring me lot of experience. Looking forward to it....