Widgets

Widgets are the pluggable user interface components that you use to define the functionality of your business spaces.

By itself, a widget typically has limited or specific capabilities. However, you can combine widgets to interact with each other to perform related tasks. Combined widgets are called a mashup. For example, you can have a widget that displays news items from an RSS feed and another widget that you can use to create tasks that you assign to someone. If you combine the two widgets onto one page, you have created a mashup in which you can see a news event and react to it by assigning someone to investigate whether the event might affect your business. Some widgets communicate with other widgets so that events in one widget affects the contents of a different widget.

You can minimize, maximize, and drag widgets while laying out a page. In addition, each widget has a menu that contains actions that you can perform on the widget. The widget menu might also have a help icon, which links to information about that widget. In addition, you can convert a widget into a hidden widget. A hidden widget is fully functional but does not display on a page unless you choose to display all widgets. Typically, you hide widgets such as the Script Adapter widget, which, instead of displaying server data, transforms business data so that another widget can use it.

Business Space provides a widget palette that contains categories of widgets you can use to configure the pages in your business spaces. These categories include:

You can also create and import your own widgets to use in your business spaces.

For example, the following screen capture shows some of the widgets provided by Business Monitoring.

To view the widgets installed on your system, open a business space and then click on the icon to open the widget palette.