Omni Designer Components Configuration Overview

The following guidelines are used:

• Ease of use takes precedence over functionality. Omni Designer allows you to build relatively complex mastering solutions with relative ease.
• No programming. The user interface guides you through complex activities without expecting you to enter a code or write scripts. Additionally, the language used by the user interface should not be technically oriented, but use normal syntax and constructs.
• Reduce time to build by a factor of 4. Similar to building in 6 weeks instead of 6 months, Omni Designer removes the complexity (without significant loss of functionality) to enable quick deployment.

A project bundle is a set of different types of information required by different subsystems in the run-time or the UI applications. The information, or metadata, does not have a common schema across those subsystems, as each subsystem has a discreet set of capabilities and operations which need to be configured.

The project bundle has its own metadata which is richer than the runtime metadata, and is organized differently. When a project bundle is deployed into runtime, the metadata is transformed into the runtime format, and stripped of all the UI-specific information.

The following additional design principles are prevalent in Omni Designer:

• Bundles and Components can be shared. Omni Designer can be installed locally with a local runtime for testing and debugging. However, Omni Designer strongly supports a central development server where projects and components can be stored and used by multiple users in multiple projects or a repository. You can also use the App Store where everyone can build and share projects and components.
• Collaborative working. Larger projects require multiple users to work simultaneously on the same project, allowing the use of real-time collaborative development of an MDM application. This is not the same as sharing components.

Shared components require features such as referential integrity, or the ability to know when something has changed, whereas collaborative working requires change control and locking.