Launching toolkit tasks

About this task
Once you have built the operation or process, you must build the corresponding view to show any required information, and have a user interface to gather input data. To do this, create a new class inheriting from the com.ibm.dse.gui.CoordinatedPanel (see Coordinated Panel in the Visual beans documentation). To handle and control any behavior of this task, a DSETaskButton class is instantiated. If you want to use your own DSETaskButton, you can extend from that class and define the new class in the configuration file.

To control the navigation between panels of the task, the DSETaskButton delegates all these actions to the Navigation Controller component. The DSENavigationController receives the various task events of opening, closing, undoing, etc.; updates the view registry; and executes the appropriate actions, sending events when needed.

For this reason, each toolkit task has an associated Navigation Controller (see Navigation Controller). To facilitate communication between the Navigation Controller and the Task, the DSETaskButton handles toolkit events signaled by the Navigation Controller.

In the Desktop configuration file, the operation attribute of the TaskLauncher or the TaskInfo component must be set to either the ID of the corresponding operation (which is defined in the operation definition files) or the name of the process. If an flowProcessPanel is defined in the view definition file, the flowProcessPanel attribute of the TaskLauncher must be set to the identifier of the corresponding CoordinatedPanel as defined in the view definition file. If the view definition file does not exist, this attribute is set to the default, which is the fully qualified name of the related operation panel class. When the end user clicks the button on the view, the system instantiates the operation and the operation panel, and associates them with each other as a task. It then shows the operation panel in the WorkingArea of the Desktop. Henceforth, it is up to the operation panel to handle the user actions on the view and to behave accordingly. If required, you can use the operation protocol to perform any of the actions in the list above, or use the Desktop protocol to perform any available action such as accessing the rest of the components to perform actions on them.