Installing the visual beans plug-in

To work with the visual beans provided with the toolkit, you must first install the beans plug-in into your copy of WebSphere® Studio Application Developer. This plug-in extends the plug-in provided by WebSphere Studio and enables you to use a visual palette to build your toolkit views.

When Application Developer starts, it reads every plug-in.xml file contained in folders within the plugins directory. The extension points in the plug-in.xml file will define the rules for the container Visual_Beans. After the plug-in is installed, toolkit beans are available in the palette in the same way as Swing or AWT components.

  1. To install the visual beans plug-in manually, copy the " Multichannel Bank Transformation Toolkit 6.1.0\plugins\com.ibm.btt.rcp.visualbean_6.1.0" from the BTT installed directory into the plugins directory of your copy of Rational® Application Developer or WebSphere Integration Developer (for example, Rational\SDP70\plugins for Rational Application Developer).
  2. Each .java source file within Application Developer is created within a Java™ project, and the scope of available classes that a Java file can reference is defined by its project's build path. To take advantage of the com.ibm.btt.rcp.visualbean_6.1.0 plug-in for a Java project, change the project's build path as follows:
    1. Right-click on the project and select Properties.
    2. Select Java Build Path.
    3. Select the Add Library tab.
    4. The Add Librarydialog box will pop up. To configure the project to include the toolkit visual beans, click SWT VisualBean entry from the list as shown in the following figure:

      Screen capture of SWT VisualBean Entry dialog when adding library

    5. Click Next, and you can see the SWT VisualBean library is added to the build path:

      Screen capture of SWT VisualBean Library included in the build path

    6. Click Finish to add the library to the build path.

When you open the Visual Editor for Java, you will see that the categories defined in the XMI file have been added at the top of the palette. You can select the JavaBeans™ and drop them onto the canvas without having to use the Choose Bean dialog. The following palette shows what you will see in the palette:

Screen capture showing the visual beans added to the palette

To open the Visual Editor for Java, you must first create a visual class (or load one of the sample applications) and then open it with the Visual Editor.

If the plug-in does not appear in the list of containers for the project, there may be errors in the plugin.xml file. WebSphere Studio writes any errors in the .log file in the .metadata directory. For example, if you forgot to include a version attribute in the plugin tag, an error will be written to the log file.