Build a Composite Application for IBM Lotus Notes V8 (10)

Course 9: Compound Application Program Connecting eclipse and NSF Components

Connecting components in a Composite Application

Follow these steps to create an event/Action relationship between NSF and eclipse components in the composite application:

On the Composite Application editor navigation page, right-click the "ndforum-author threaded View" component and select wiring. As shown in Figure 42, the connection panel appears, where ndforum is used as the source component and its unique attributes are listed. The Lotus Notes contacts view component has no action. Tag Cloud has six actions that have the same namespace and data type as the attributes of the ndforum component.

Figure 42. components on the current Composite Application page are displayed on the connection interface

Connect the publish topics attribute of the "nd Forum-author threaded View" component to the primary data action of the tag cloud component, as shown in Figure 43.

Figure 43. Link an attribute to an action

The connection between the publish topics attribute and the primary data action is displayed, as shown in Figure 44.

Figure 44. The connection interface displays the connection between attributes and attributes.

Click OK to confirm the connection update and close the panel.

Select File-finish editing to modify the compound application.

A confirmation dialog box appears. Click Yes. After the Composite Application editor is disabled, the updated Composite Application is displayed, as shown in Figure 45.

Figure 45. Updated connected composite applications in Lotus Notes V8

Tip: You can adjust the size of components in a composite application.

To observe the new event/Action relationships created through the connection, select a document from the Lotus Notes contacts view component. This component will publish an attribute, and the options in the ndforum component will change. The ndforum component also publishes an attribute. If the newly selected row is a top-level category in the Lotus Notes view, this attribute is triggered. We connect this property to the tag cloud component. Its actions display the list of subcategories of the selected user based on the content of the ndforum component.

In this course, we added a connection between the NSF component in the ndforum application and the eclipse component in the tag cloud application through the Composite Application editor feature of the Lotus Notes V8 client. A connection has been defined between the profiles application and the NSF component in the ndforum application. Now there are two connections in the composite application.