Topic Title

Underlying the entire Workshop Studio product family is the unique AppXRay technology that manages framework artifacts for code completion, consistency checking with generated classes, configuration files or annotations, pre-build error checking, and validation that reaches all the levels of your application.

In order to use AppXRay, you must:

Create a dynamic web project inside Studio (and AppXRay will automatically be enabled) OR enable AppXRay on an existing web project OR enable AppXRay on a project from an older version of Studio.
AppXRay will then build its application database that allows it to track artifacts and populate it. If you have created a project with Struts, Kodo or JSF enabled, those artifacts will be detected and added to the database. If you have enabled AppXRay on an existing project, then artifacts in that project will be detected and added to the database. AppXRay then uses this database for validation.
As you work with your application, AppXRay will automatically maintain the application database. If this degrades performance, you can selectively disable automatic maintenance and rebuild the application database as required.
Errors detected by AppXRay are displayed in the Problems view.
While working on an application, Variables view displays all of the artifacts detected by AppXRay.
AppXaminer displays a tree showing what artifacts use and are used by. You can trace through the tree to see a map of dependencies and diagnose missing elements.

Enabling and Disabling AppXRay

Normally, AppXRay is enabled. However if this causes performance to decrease unacceptably, you can disable AppXRay by clicking Project > Properties and expanding the Builders item.

To disable AppXRay, uncheck beside the AppXRay builder as shown below.

To re-enable AppXRay, simply click to put a check back beside the AppXRay builder.

AppXRay builder is also disabled if you use the Project > Build Automatically command to disable automatic builds. Within the Workshop Studio products, automatic builds are done not only for Java classes but for the AppXRay application database.

Manually Rebuilding the Application Database

If you have disabled the AppXRay builder or if AppXRay features are not working as expected, you can rebuild the application database by right clicking on your project in the AppXplorer view and choosing Rebuild AppXRay Database from the menu.

AppXRay Validation

The Application Database, AppXRay, analyzes the JSP pages, Java source files, resource bundles, and web configuration files and uses this information to build a database of the relationships between these artifacts. The BEA Workshop Studio group of products then use the information stored in AppXRay to provide validation and consistency checking across all layers of the application.

Project level validation properties

To set project-level validation properties, click Project > Properties and expand Validation - AppXRay.

File level validation properties

The BEA Workshop Studio group of products also provide the same level of validation control for a single source file. In this case, you insert JSP comments containing the validation property to disable/enable. These comments can be placed anywhere within the source code and the IDE will enforce these properties for the single file. The following table defines the validation properties for a single file.

Validation Property	Definition
<%--<nitrox:set-property property="validation.missingFile" value="true"/> --%>	Controls validation for missing files. The default value of true will complain about missing files.
<%--<nitrox:set-property property="validation.unresolvedVar" value="false"/> --%>	Controls validation for unresolved variables. The default value of false will not complain about unresolved variables.
<%--<nitrox:set-property property="validation.compile" value="true" />--%>	Controls scriptlet compilation. The default value of true enables scriptlet compilation on the page.
<%--<nitrox:set-property property="validation" value="true"/> --%>	Controls all validation in the IDE. The default value of true enables validation.

Live Synchronization of Artifacts with AppXRay

Enabling and Disabling AppXRay

Manually Rebuilding the Application Database

AppXRay Validation

Project level validation properties

File level validation properties