Projects & Resources

Everything you build with Studio lives in a project. A project is versioned as revisions, and a revision holds resources — one per custom model, view, action, menu, selection, query or workflow. Every resource opens in a visual designer.

Opening Studio

The Studio menu appears for users of the admins group when the Studio feature is enabled with features.studio = true in axelor-config.properties. Its entries:

Projects

The projects you are building — the usual starting point.

Resources

A flat, searchable list of every resource across all projects.

Build Jobs

Compilation jobs — see Build Jobs & Repositories.

Configuration → Repositories

Git repositories projects can sync to.

Studio projects grid
There is a shortcut from anywhere in the application: on any view, technical users see a Studio button in the toolbar. It opens the designer directly on the view you are looking at — no need to find the resource in a project first.

Creating a project

  1. Open Studio → Projects and click New.

  2. Fill in the Name (lowercase, todo-app style), the Group (a package name like com.axelor.apps), a Title and a Description.

  3. Save. The project starts with an initial revision.

These are the same coordinates a hand-written module would have — a deployed project behaves exactly like one.

Working in a revision

Open the project and, from its Revisions list, open the revision you are working on — day-to-day that’s the latest one. The revision is where everything happens:

  • The tabs group its resources by type: Views, Models, Fields, Selections, Queries, Actions, Menus, Workflows.

  • Each tab’s New button creates a resource and opens its designer immediately. Views and actions have a New menu instead, one entry per kind.

  • The toolbar carries the lifecycle buttons — activate, publish, export, sync, build — described in Lifecycle.

Two Options on the revision control which model kinds it may contain:

Allow json entity

Shows the Models tab — custom models, live immediately on activation. Enabled by default on new projects.

Allow entity

Shows the Entities and Enums tabs — compiled JPA models that require a build.

On the Workflows tab you can also import an existing module workflow into the project. The workflow designer itself is documented in Workflow designer.

The designer

Whatever the resource type, the designer has the same layout:

Studio designer: canvas
Canvas

The object being built — a form layout, a field list, a menu tree.

Palette

Items you drag onto the canvas: fields for a model, widgets for a form, node types for a workflow. The Structure tab shows the canvas as an outline, handy for selecting items in deeply nested layouts.

Inspector

The properties of whatever is selected, edited on the right.

Save / Preview

Save stores your work in the project. View designers also offer a live Preview of the view as the application will render it.

Saving a resource in a draft revision never changes the running application. Changes go live when the revision is activated; from then on the revision’s resources go live as you save them (a workflow is deployed from its designer) — see Lifecycle.

Finding and managing resources

  • Studio → Resources lists every resource of every project with its type, status and version — the quickest way to find one by name. Open a resource and click the designer button in its toolbar to edit it.

  • Deleting a resource removes it from the revision. To take a deployed customization out of the running application, deactivate the revision instead.