The Properties Dialog

Isn't it nice to be able to develop (and run!) clients for two different Documentum product versions on the same workstation at once? Here I am writing code that interfaces with DFS 6 for this challenge, whilst at the same time writing enhancements and bug fixes for existing applications that use DFC 5.3. One thing that I'm excited about is the removal of all native libraries from the client's stack - making it much easier to have multiple client library versions in use on one machine (on Windows, at least!)

My first job is to develop the properties dialog for Gtop, which initially will just allow the user to view and update document attributes. So far, interacting with the DFS has been quite straightforward, making use of the Object Service to get and update properties. The only slight irritation is that the Gtop client-side code can not directly construct (or access) the DataPackage object required by the DFS service - because it does not implement the 'IsSerializable' interface that all GWT client-side classes must do. As a result, I have to convert the PropertySet DFS class to a HashMap before sending it to the client code, and vice versa when sending the changed properties back to the DFS. Perhaps some kind of adaptor, or extension of DataPackage that implements IsSerializable is in order....