Kexi Components For Reuse

This document lists Kexi components being ready (or almost) for reusing in external KDE applications. Depending on developer's wish, ne or more these frameworks will be added to kdelibs.

See also: Projects Using Kexi Components

Table of Contents    KexiDB - Database Abstraction Layer    Data-aware Widgets for KexiDB    Data Migration    Properties and Property Editor Framework    Form Designer    Shared Actions    KROSS

KexiDB - Database Abstraction Layer

Much extended comparing to QtSQL. Read here. Being developed since august 2003, it represents high stability and quality level. However, for now good advice is to copy its source code (kexidb/ directory) to own project to avoid dependency on (not yet fully stable) API.

To learn more about the API, start with Kexi API Docs (KexiDB namespace) and check the examples in kexi/tests/newapi/ directory in the Kexi source code.

KexiDB will be relased as external package at the same moment as Kexi 1.0.

Data-aware Widgets for KexiDB

Depends on KexiDB.

• KexiFormView provides a data-driven (record-based) form view.
• KexiTableView and KexiDataTableView provides data-driven tabular view.

Data-aware widgets library will be relased as external package a few days after Kexi 1.0 release. For now it's too much integrated with Kexi.

Data Migration

Depends on KexiDB.

Framework for importing databases into native KexiDB databases.

Not yet released as separate library. Will be probably bundled with KexiDB.

Properties and Property Editor Framework

This library, called koproperty, is a set of classes implementing generic properties framework.

• More information

Form Designer

Can be reused as a general-purpose form designer for KDE Applications (escpecially, for creating extension dialogs in user-space). It is more user-friendly than Qt Designer: all complex terms and redundant widgets are hidden by default.

Form designer has been also released as standalone application, what can be considered as a use case. Releasing it as external libraries is planned.

Shared Actions

Shared Actions framework enables you to share actions between multiple windows/dialogs opened within the same application. Toolbars' visibility and menu entries are visible/invisible or disabled/enabled, depending on a type and state of active window. Multiple KXMLGUI clients are used to implement this effect.

For now this framework is hidden inside kexicore library and is loosely dependent on KMDI. For KDE4, dependency on KMDI will be dropped.

Related issues:

• at GUI level, MS Ribbon-like toolbar could be a solution
• what about menus getting too big, having all the possible options (let's look at KDevelop or even at Kate)

KROSS

Scripting layer used as bridge between scripting backends like Kross::Python and so called functionality wrappers like Kross::KexiDB. Backeds are implemented as plugins, so KROSS itself doesn't depend on KexiDB nor Python.