A little used but highly valuable tool that could save you hours of time researching how the various pieces of OFBiz fit together, the Artifact Info utility is a necessity for easily assembling OFBiz piece-part information (where OFBiz pieces are called "artifacts") into a coherent story. Artifacts may include anything and everything that goes into making up your OFBiz instance. This WebTool utility works with the following OFBiz artifacts: entities, widgets (screen, form, menu, tree), Events, Services, and controller.xml files.
Note
Note: to use this tool, set your min and max memory within your OFBiz startup file (or on the command line) generously as assembling artifact information consumes large amounts of memory!
To get started with the WebTools Artifact Info tool, either navigate to the WebTools main web page and select the Artifact Info navigation link, or go directly to the tool's URL located at:
https://localhost:8443/webtools/control/ArtifactInfo
If you have not already logged in, you will be prompted to log in. Enter the administrator's username and password. If these have not changed since initial system download, the administrative user's name is "admin" and the password is "ofbiz".
There are a number of ways to use the Artifact Info tool, and the reader is encouraged to experiment and find methods best suited to their needs. Some of these are listed:
- To find artifacts associated with a particular Component or webapp, enter information as shown here:
- To follow a link, for example, to delve deeper into the artifacts found for the e-commerce screen to see details about the
AddBlogResponseScreen widget, click on the link provided. This will bring up a web page similar to the following:
- To view artifact information for a specific entity, for example, the
ElectronicTextentity as shown here, return to the main Artifact Info web page and select entity from the pull-down menu provided. Enter ElectronicText in the Search Names/Locations field. - Click the Find button to bring up a web page similar to the following:
Since OFBiz knows the configuration of every artifact in advance of any usage, it can programmatically assemble all the relationships involved in any single artifact, including information about how other artifacts are used to build one by parsing all its configuration tables and building a dynamic, runtime view of the relationships that exist among all the artifacts.