Code Google Search in no time using Creator 2.

Java Studio Creator is bundled with a very powerful data handling layer between the components and the underlying data. Data Provider allows the users to access data in a consistent way, even though the data may come from different sources such as Database, EJB or a Web Service. In this blog I want to show how to use Data Provider to connect to Google Search Web Service to fetch data and display it in a table with proper link to web sites. Every thing is done graphically except for 2 line of code user needs to write in the Java file. Yes, just 2 line - it is not a typo!

This is what you need to do after creating a creating a project in Creator 2. Lets call the project GoogleSearch.

Adding components

• Add a Text Field
• Add a button  (text - Google Search)
• Add a Table component

Adding Web Service

• Drag and Drop
      Servers -> Web Services -> samples -> GoogleSearch -> doGoogleSearch
      (This adds W/S client googleSearchClient1 & MethodResultTableDataProvider
        googleSearchDoGoogleSearch1)
• Select googleSearchDoGoogleSearch1 in the out line and modify in the property sheet
        key - <your Google search key>  (Note: You need to register and get a
                  key at http://www.google.com/apis)
        maxResults = 10
        q - Sun Java Studio Creator (Initial search, you can change it
        later in the text field)

Adding Data Provider

• Drag and Drop an Object Array Data Provider. (id - resultArrayDataProvider) 
• Add an indexed property called "resultArray" of type webservice.googlesearchservice.ResultElement[]
• Select resultArrayDataProvider and set its array property to "resultArray"

Setting Data Provider to Table

• Right click on table and select Table layout and then select Data Provider resultArrayDataProvider
• Remove all columns except URL, snippet, summary and title
• Select HyperLink for component type for the column URL
• In the Outline Select tableColumn1 -> hyperlink and click [...] for the "url" property in the property sheet
• Deselect "escapt" property of  tableColumn2 -> staticText1, tableColumn3 -> staticText2, tableColumn3 -> staticText2

Setting Text Field Value to googleSearchDoGoogleSearch1

• Right click on TextField and  select property binding and set the binding to googleSearchDoGoogleSearch1
     (The text should be - Sun Java Studio Creator)

Setting the Search Result to resultArrayDataProvider

• Double click on "Google Search" button and add code

 resultArray = (ResultElement[]) ((GoogleSearchResult) getGoogleSearchDoGoogleSearch1()
               .getResultObject()).getResultElements();
 resultArrayDataProvider.setArray(resultArray);

Deploy and see the result after clicking on the "Google Search" button.

Note: Our document team is in the process of writing a more elaborate tutorial on this subject. Stay tuned

Posted at 11:26PM Nov 11, 2005  |  Permanent link to this entry