Overview

You can use Lotus Expeditor Toolkit, an Eclipse integrated development environment (IDE), or Rational Application Developer to build Eclipse components. Composite applications accessed by Notes can include combinations of NSF components and Eclipse components. These components then interact via inter-component communication supported by the property broker.

Building an Eclipse component includes the following procedures:

• Determine the properties the component will publish
• Determine the actions the component will perform when it is wired to the property of another component
• Create the WSDL file that lists the actions and properties for the component
• Define an extension point in your plug-in (via the plugin.xml file) that refers to the WSDL
• Use the new property broker Java(TM) APIs for properties and actions.
• Write actions implementing the interfaces defined in your plugin.xml. The class that implements an action must already have been defined in the extension point referenced in your plugin.xml.
• Deploy the component by creating or updating an update site project. This is an Eclipse project and the output of this project can be hosted on a HTTP server or in a local folder.

• The plug-ins must be packed using an update site project.
• The update site can either be hosted on a HTTP server (for example, http://test.ibm.com/casample/site.xml) or can be made available locally (for example, file:/C:/test/casample/site.xml). In the second case the updateSite directory must be available in exactly the same location on the user’s machine. The second case is typically just for testing.
• The URL must be set in the property url.feature in the CA.xml. This is done automatically by the Composite Application Editor when a component is added from an Eclipse update site.
• When the composite application is loaded in IBM® Lotus® Notes® for the first time, provisioning occurs using the given URL. The required plug-ins are downloaded automatically into the shared/eclipse folders.

It is necessary that you create your Java(TM) plug-in components and then associate the plug-ins in an Eclipse feature project.
Once this is done, it is important that you create or update an update site project. This is an Eclipse project and the output of this project can be hosted on a HTTP server. In the IBM Lotus Notes environment, features and plug-ins are updated and provisioned from the update site location.

You can develop Eclipse components for use in a composite application as presented below:

• Use an Eclipse IDE.
• Define properties and actions in a .WSDL file, which is an XML file.
• Define the class that implements the action and the link to the .xml file as an extension in the component’s plugin.xml, for example (see bold text):
  

  <plugin>

  <extension

           id="loadURLAction"

           name="Load A URL into Our Window"

           point="com.ibm.rcp.propertybroker.PropertyBrokerAction">

           <action

                 active="true"            

  class=

  "com.ibm.pvc.samples.propertybroker.browser.LoadURLAction"

                 file="loadurlaction.wsdl"/>

    </extension>

  ...

  </plugin>

Note For more complete information, refer to the IBM Lotus Expeditor toolkit documentation.

import org.eclipse.core.commands.AbstractHandler;

import org.eclipse.core.commands.ExecutionEvent;

import com.ibm.rcp.propertybroker.event.*;

import com.ibm.rcp.propertybroker.property.*;

public class YourAction extends AbstractHandler {

public Object execute(ExecutionEvent arg0) throws ExecutionException {

Object event = arg0.getTrigger();

if (event instanceof PropertyChangeEvent){

PropertyChangeEvent e = (PropertyChangeEvent)event;

PropertyValue propValue = e.getPropertyValue();

if(propValue.getProperty().getType().equalsIgnoreCase("employeeName")) {

String employee = (String)propValue.getValue();

// do something

}

} return null; } }

import com.ibm.rcp.propertybroker.service.*;

...

String selectedEntry = ...;

PropertyBroker broker = PropertyBrokerFactory.getBroker();)

PropertyValue[] values = new PropertyValue[1];

SimpleProperty sProp = new SimpleProperty(selectedEntry);

Property property = broker.getProperty( "http://www.ibm.com/notes/pb/sample", "Subject");

values[0] = PropertyFactory.createPropertyValue(property, sProp);

broker.changedProperties(values);

Glossary