More documentation for writing custom Factory Extensions

Hello Ole,

I think it would have helped a bit earlier, but I'm a bit further along, using your blog post to base it on. Thank you for the link, though, as I will probably use it for future projects.

One thing that is giving me a bit of a hangup is the amount of building required to set up your UI for an Assertion or Test Step. I haven't written any Swing code since my college days, and the mixture of Swing and the SoapUI extensions to it is a bit overwhelming. To me, this is just a weird part of SoapUI that I didn't think would require hand-writing the Swing DesktopPanel for every Assertion. So much of SoapUI looks like it was laid out automatically by reflection, so knowing that I have to write UI is daunting to me, at least.

So, with that, I have a couple questions:

• Do I use the same ModelItemDesktopPanel<MyCustomAssertion> when writing my own UI for an Assertion as I would for a Test Step?
  

  public class MyCustomAssertionDesktopPanel extends ModelItemDesktopPanel<MyCustomAssertion> { ... }



• Where can I read more about what the base class ModelItemDesktopPanel provides? What other kinds of UI components are useful to use, similar to the PropertyExpansionContainer?


• You mention in the blog post that you could also use JavaFX. Since I feel I'm starting with no knowledge of either Swing or JavaFX, I considered it, but don't know or have any examples to look at in SoapUI that utilize JavaFX. Are tehre examples in SoapUI that use JavaFX panels to try to borrow inspriation from? Where can I start?


• With a TestAssertion, what things can you implement besides a ResponseAssertion? What would the example in your project do without that interface implemented?

I don't expect answers to all of these, but seeing these in blog posts, or other documents, would be pretty helpful overall. I'm no Swing developer, and my JavaFX skills are nil, so at this point, I'm struggling with parts of SoapUI I have never had to work with in order to extend WSDL/JSON/REST/XML assertions, etc. It would be nice if there were some really basic UI builders, such as things like being able to just define a class and annotate it with a field, a la JAXB, for instance:

public class MyCustomAssertion extends WsdlMessageAssertion implements PropertyExpansionContainer {

    @SoapUITextField(name= "Subject")
    public final String subjectLine;

    @SoapUITextArea(name= "Email Message")
    public final String emailMessage;
    ....
    etc., etc.
}

But short of that, at least knowing more about the SoapUI Swing layer, or maybe just the JavaFX layer, would help a lot.