Defining the properties

  1. Add the terminals for your node. You must define an input terminal. Output terminals are optional. For each input terminal you want, put your cursor in the In Terminals field, and click the Add button. Likewise, for each output terminal you want, put your cursor in the Out Terminals field, and click the Add button.
  2. To rename each terminal, right-click on the terminal name and click Rename.
  3. Click on the Properties tab at the bottom of the editor area. From here you can add the node's attributes, such as a database name, a host server name, or a password. The attributes you set here must match the attributes specified in the user-defined node itself using the get and set methods. You can also customize the text that appears in the node properties view for each property. To set the text, open the nodename.properties file, and edit the line: Property.<propertyName>=<descriptive text>.
  4. If the node is an input node, select the node name in the hierarchy and check the Input node checkbox. From here you can also specify that you want the node to initialize with the broker's default values by checking the Use broker defaults checkbox.
  5. Right-click on Basic in the hierarchy and click Add Property. To create separate pages of properties, you can use the Add Property Group function.
  6. Select the correct attribute type. This can be one of the built-in types, or a type to match the list of values the property can have.
  7. Enter any default values. This value applies as if the flow developer had set this value themselves. It will be shown in the Properties dialog.
  8. If you want to generate a property editor or a compiler, specify the location for these resources in the relevant field.
  9. Specify the system property for each attribute that you define. This can be one of the following:
    • Hidden: The property is not displayed in the properties or promotion dialogs.
    • Read only: The property is displayed, but cannot be changed.
    • Mandatory: A value is required. The field cannot be left blank. Boolean and enum properties are always mandatory.
    • Configurable: The property can be configured at deployment time.
  10. Close the nodename.msgnode file.

You can change the order in which the properties are listed by reordering them using drag-and-drop.

If you do not want to add any of the optional features, you can test your node at this point. To do this you need to launch another instance of the workbenchStart of change, see Enabling PDE runtime capabilitiesEnd of change, and select Run > Run as > Runtime Workbench. See the PDE Guide for more information about testing using the Runtime Workbench.

Related concepts
User-defined input nodes
User-defined message processing nodes
User-defined output nodes
Related tasks
Creating a user-defined node project
Creating the user-defined node plug-in files
Related reference
User-defined extensions