case/4/0 goes Internet – Web Publishing with case/4/0

More and more often, software is being developed in the form of distributed projects. One reason for this is intensive competition. No longer regionally bound, competition is especially fierce in areas such as bids for projects in the public domain. A new approach in respect to where users are located is also responsible for this trend. Know-how which is distributed over various locations, either due to large company size or to outsourcing, is becoming more and more the rule.

The Internet offers interesting possibilities for distributed projects – such as direct access to the documentation of development results, for example. case/4/0 takes the communication and information pathways of the Internet and intranet into account. Special functions are integrated for publishing design documents for the Web.

case/4/0 manages all software development results centrally in its repository, thus ensuring their consistency. You can evaluate the repository using case/4/0's Web Publisher any time, creating HTML documents based on repository data. These documents can then be made available to all project team members over the Net.

case/4/0 takes the saying "a picture is worth a thousand words" to heart, even when it comes to Web publishing. The graphic results of system analysis can be inserted directly into the HTML document. Not only is an HTML page created for each diagram, but the pages are also linked to each other in the process. Starting from a sort of "homepage", which is based on the user interface of case/4/0's main window, you can quickly reach all of the information for a particular context.

Application Examples

Here's what case/4/0's Web Publisher offers you in everyday use:

Requirements Specification on the Internet

The Web Publisher allows you to publish your requirements specification in the Internet and intranet. The pages generated with the Web Publisher can be displayed using any of today's popular Web browsers, to help stem the paper flood.

Decentralized Application Development

With case/4/0, you can store part systems separately, which helps you in divvying up tasks. Using the Web Publisher, up to date evaluations of part systems can be run at any time and all of the specification and design knowledge can be made easily accessible to all project team members over the Internet/intranet.

Expressive Documents thanks to Hyperlinks

HTML is particularly well suited to documenting development results because of its ability to use links to depict relationships between individual diagrams in the repository.

Easy Customizing

The generation of HTML pages – as with source code generation – is based on scripts. So you can control the output's layout and scope to fit your needs. This lets you implement both functional extensions to the HTML language, as well company-specific style guidelines.

Web Publishing Made Easy with case/4/0

After calling up the Web Publisher, select the diagram types you would like to be published and the diagrams whose properties will be described in the HTML document.

The Web-Publisher generates an HTML page for each diagram. The graphic is automatically equipped with hotspots, enabling easy navigation between the individual pages.

In a relational model, for example, hotspots are defined for every relation. When you click them, the hotspots take you directly to a page which contains additional information about the chosen relation. Clicking the relation "Article" in the relational model takes you directly to this relation. All of the relation's attributes are displayed here, together with their references and data elements. You can go to any of them by clicking the link.

Web Publishing with case/4/0: You can reach any element with a click.

Custom Documents: Code Scripting with case/4/0

case/4/0's repository is a relational database. Using a simple scripting language, you have direct access to the tables and attributes in the repository. To take advantage of this possibility, just define a code script, which usually selects a relation from the repository first, and then carries out a series of operations on it.

The scripts developed for Web publishing read in information exactly according to this schema and write it into files in HTML format. The code scripts which are included with the tool intentionally use only common HTML language elements in order to ensure the compatibility of the generated pages with most browsers.

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