architecture.txt

The Pentaho Modeler is Pentaho's long term initiative to replace Pentaho Schema Workbench and 
Pentaho Metadata Editor.  It exists as a perspective today in Pentaho Data Integration, and as
a component within the Pentaho User Console as part of the Datasource Wizard.  Our plan is to support
a variety of logical modeling scenarios, including bottom up design of Analysis and Metadata models 
within Pentaho, as well as top down design of logical models.

This project is built using pentaho-xul, a UI framework based on the Mozilla XUL standard 
which allows for multi-environment UI development, including Swing, SWT and HTML/Javascript (GWT).  
The pentaho-xul project can be found here:
https://github.com/pentaho/pentaho-commons-xul

A good starting point for debugging and experimenting with the modeler is by running the 
SwtModelerUI java class in your favorite IDE.  First, run "ant resolve" to download all necessary dependencies 
for this project.  Second, if in Eclipse, run "ant create-dot-classpath" to generate an up to date 
.classpath file with the new jars.  Finally, add Kettle's lib-swt/PLATFORM/swt.jar to the top of 
the classpath.  Now you can run SwtModelerUI.

Key Files
---------

XUL files located in src/org/pentaho/agilebi/modeler/res
 - These files represent the UI of the modeler, the panel.xul is the main xul file, and it includes
 child panels and views as necessary.
 
ModelerWorkspace.java - the parent model of the UI
ModelerController.java - the parent controller of the UI

org.pentaho.agilebi.modeler.nodes package
 - this package contains the list and tree nodes that appear in the modeler
 
org.pentaho.agilebi.modeler.propforms package
 - this package contains the  form controllers that drive the right side of the modeler
 
org.pentaho.agilebi.modeler.strategy package
 - this package contains the architecture for automodeling various physical model types
 
 
Integration
----------- 
 
The modeler project is included in the following assemblies

Pentaho BI Platform Data Access Plugin:
https://github.com/pentaho/data-access