Creating Custom Options

This chapter explains how to create custom options using the exteNd Director development environment. It contains the following sections:

About the Portal Option wizard

You create a new portal option by using the Portal Option Wizard, which is available in the exteNd Director development environment.

The Portal Option Wizard creates an option descriptor file. This file provides several elements that describe the option, including a display name and description, as well as a link and a set of images for the option.

Creating a portal option file

Procedure To create a portal option file:

Start exteNd Director and open the project of interest.
Select File>New>File.

The New File dialog displays:
Click the Portal tab.
Choose Option and click OK.

The option descriptor editor displays.
In the option descriptor editor, specify the general settings for the option descriptor file.

For details about the elements of the option descriptor file, see Portal option descriptor file.
On the States tab, define one or more hidden states for the portal option. To add a new state, click Add. Then double-click NEW_STATE and type the name for the state.

Hidden states are states in which an option should not be displayed. For example, when a portlet is minimized, you would typically want to hide the minimize option on the title bar.

You can specify any of the predefined portal states (normal, minimized, or maximized) as hide-states. If you are using the built-in action handler (EboActionHandler), these are the only states available. If you write your own custom action handler, you can provide support for additional states.
Select File>Save.

exteNd Director saves the option descriptor file in the portal-option directory within a resource set. The ID for the option is the name of its descriptor file, without the XML extension.

For more information about where files are located in a resource set, see the section on subdirectories for resources and Java classes in Developing exteNd Director Applications.