Oridea Platform emblem
About Oridea
Downloads
Screenshots

Nex Web-browser
Oridea Hyperpad

Documentation
Tutorials
Roadmap

Contribute
Contact

Simplest Oridea application development tutorial

1. Requirments

We will develop our Hello, Oridea! application using following software:
  • Microsoft Visual Studio.NET 2003 - IDE where we will create our application. Probably, you can use SharpDevelop or any other IDE with C# support.
  • Oridea Nex A2 b4741 - Nex - show engine of Oridea Platform. This is latest version of Oridea for the moment of this article publishing.
Let imagine that %oridea% is a directory where you install Nex, for example - C:\Oridea Platform.

2.1. Create Project

  1. Open Visual Studio.NET 2003;
  2. Click File > New > Project in main menu.
  3. Choose Class Library in Templates window and name project as HelloOridea.
    Result should look as following:
    New Project window
    Click OK.
  4. Add reference to the Oridea.dll assembly, it is located in %oridea% directory.
    To do this, you should open Solution Explorer (press Ctrl+Alt+L if it isn't appear), click right button on References item and click on Add Reference.
    In .NET tab, click Browse... button. Open your Oridea Platform installation directory, than open Oridea.DLL file. Solution Explorer will looks like on this picture:
    Solution Explorer window
  5. OK, ready to write a code lines.

2.2. Write basic code

Insert following code lines into Class1.cs code file of your project. 
using System;

using Oridea;
using Oridea.Data;
using Oridea.HTUI;

namespace HelloOridea
{
	public class IndexPage : Oridea.HTUI.Page
	{
		public override void GenerateLDP(Courier courier)
		{
			courier.Transfer("\r\n\r\n<h1>Hello, Oridea!</h1>");
		}
	}
}

3.1. Project directory

Open your %oridea% directory. Probably, it contains following elements: 
odtp/
skin/
history/
configuration/
nex.english.languageset.xml
nex.russian.languageset.xml
nex.exe.manifest
application.ico
Interop.SHDocVw.DLL
ICSharpCode.SharpZipLib.DLL
AxInterop.SHDocVw.DLL
Oridea.DLL
Nex.exe
Open %oridea%/odtp/i folder. Create hello folder. Go to your project. Click on Project > HelloOridea Properties... item in the main menu. Set Output path property to the folder, which you create before like on the picture:
HelloOridea Property Pages
Open Solution Explorer window, expand References item, right click on Oridea, set Copy Local property to False.
Build your project (Ctrl+Shift+B).

3.2. Registering application in ODTP configuration file

This step is required only during the application development process, end-users should never modify ODTP configuration file manually, because of .OA files standard available. We will create our application installer later, now we should register our application in ODTP configuration manually.

To do this, open %oridea%/odtp/oridea.odtp.config.xml file in Notepad, Visual Studio or any other text editor that supports UTF-8 text encoding.
Insert following lines before </odtp> end tag (after last <domain> tag): 
    <domain name="hello.i" homepage="odtp:/hello.i/index" 
        application="Hello, Oridea!">
      <category name="">
        <page name="index" class="dynamic" 
            assembly="HelloOridea.dll" 
            assemblyClass="HelloOridea.IndexPage" 
            assemblyMethod="" 
            sidebar-style="" />
      </category>
    </domain>
This will give to Oridea all needed information about our application, which now owns domain hello.i, named as Hello, Oridea! and has default page address odtp:/hello.i/index

3.3. Running our application

Start Nex, or restart it if it is already loaded. Click on ☼ hyperlink on your toolbar (located near links to Favorites, History and Search sidebars in bottom-left corner of toolbar). Click on Hello, Oridea! link. Result should look like following:
Hello, Oridea! application

How this works

Now we try to understand how our Hello, Oridea! application and Oridea works.
  1. During the Nex loading process, initialization methods of Oridea parses ODTP configuration file and gets information about Hello, Oridea! application.
  2. When we open Oridea applications sidebar, it collects information about all of installed applications and shows it.
  3. When we click on Hello, Oridea! link on sidebar, Nex requires forming of odtp:/hello.i/index LDP (see terminology), which is configured as default page of our application.
  4. Oridea loads HelloOridea.dll class library, creates an instance of HelloOridea.IndexPage class and performs LDP forming.
  5. Our code transfers to given by Oridea courier object HTML data.
  6. Oridea says to Nex that LDP transefer some data.
  7. Finally, Nex shows generated page to user.
SourceForge.net Logo