The Synergy Repository is a powerful tool that provides the ability to define your Synergy data into structures. Structures contain fields, defined keys and tag values. All of these capabilities are used by the CodeGen code generation tool to provide your Symphony Framework with the required elements.

Synergy Repository is a program that allows you to manage your data definitions. The Symphony Framework builds code generated components based on structures within your repository. Once you have created your repository structure, assigned fields, defined field attributes, key segments and tag definition you can take full advantage of CodeGen to begin to build the components of your Symphony Framework based development.

If you are building a repository from scratch it is recommended that you define your base field types as Templates. Templates allow you to define the individual fields types and then assign the templates to each field you define in each structure. If you need to change or update a template, these changes will be reflected for each field assigned to the template. This hierarchy provides for an efficient method of defining and managing your data definitions.

When you utilize the Synergy Repository and the CodeGen utility with the Symphony Framework templates to generate the styles for your user interface controls the templates utilize the fields and attributes defined in your repository. When processing a field there are a number of styles produced. The different styles allow you to accommodate a number of different scenarios in your Windows Presentation Foundation applications.

There are a number of field types that you can define, within each field type there are a large number of attributes that you can set. These attributes are used by the CodeGen tool, and the specified Symphony Framework CodeGen template, to generate the appropriate source code. Click on the field type on the left to review the available settings for the required field type.

Against each individual field/template you can associate data in the long description attribute. The symphony Framework utilizes this long description attribute to allow you to define additional non-repository field attributes. Symphony Tokens can be defined in the long description. All tokens begin SYMPHONY_. If you currently use the long description for your own purposes then you should make provisions within your application to enable the addition of the symphony tokens.

Using the Synergy Repository, Symphony Framework templates and CodeGen you can build powerful Symphony Data Object and user interface styles, user controls and windows. All field entry controls utilize styles. A style defines how the user control will be rendered on the user interface. They also provide the ability to enable and display field/prompt entities, provide error state information and control input focus.