Form Builders and Form Validation

The Form Builders and Validation Builder are Eclipse builders that perform various post-processing operations on a form model when the project is built. Generally speaking, the Eclipse auto-build feature will be enabled, which causes an incremental build to run automatically whenever a file is saved. When you create a new Business Studio project that includes forms functionality, the New Project Wizard configures the project with the Form Builders and Validation Builder.

Note: Consult the Eclipse documentation for further information on the Eclipse build system.

The Validation Builder also performs live validation, which occurs automatically whenever any aspect of the form is modified through the Form Designer canvas, Outline view, or Property view. Form validations can be configured via the Preferences dialog at Window > Preferences > Form Designer > Errors/Warnings.

For each of the validation rules enforced by the Validation Builder, you can use the dropdown list to configure the severity of each problem as Error, Warning, Info, or Ignore.

Note: The default problem severities are carefully chosen to minimize the possibility of errors at runtime. Change them only on the recommendation of TIBCO Support.

Form Builders

The Form Builders externalize display strings from the form model into property resource files with the path name /<project>/<form-folder>/<form-name>.properties, where

<project> is the project name,

<form-folder> is the folder containing the form file, and

<form-name> is the unqualified name of the form file, minus the .form file extension.

Note: To create a localized version of a form, you will make a copy of this .properties file, rename it by appending the appropriate standard two-character ISO language code (and, optionally, country and variant codes), and translate the strings into the desired language.

For more information about how to localize a form, see The Form and Form Elements .

Validation Builder

The Validation Builder performs these functions:

  • Analyses the form model for general syntactical and semantic errors and inconsistencies
  • Applies constraints specific to the target platform/version
  • Reports any such problems as problem markers, which show up in the Problems view. To make it easier to locate problems, the problem markers for errors also appear as decorator icons adjacent to the offending form element in the Project Explorer, the Outline view, and in the Form Designer. For more information about problem markers, see Problem Markers.