Teiid Designer 7.7 included a new feature that exposes common action sets in a Guides view.

The intent of this document is to provide a forum for discussion around abstracting this feature into a framework that can be used/implemented via any JBoss Tools project and potentially allow for defining cross-project action sets.

On the right, is a screen cap from the 7.7 users guide:

Highlights of current framework:

• Underlying actions, dialogs and wizards were modified to provide awareness of "properties" that might contain info that could see the dialog/wizard with initial information. In Teiid Designer's case, the "Define Teiid Model Project" action presents a dialog for creating a new model project or selecting an existing one. Once the project is set, then each subsequent action (Define Source, Define relational view table, etc) that would contain an UI entry for a project location would be initialized with that project.
• Guides framework utilizes a top-level plugin to expose through plugin dependencies any action that needs to be called in an action set.
• Current framework is not configurable by the user.
• In order to accommodate the action guides concept, some actions/dialogs required a new "create or select existing" dialog. A couple of examples are shown below.

Thoughts on abstracting this guides framework:

1. Should these action sets be configurable by users? i.e. mix/match actions from a "list" of available actions and be persisted in config/xml type files?
2. Should each action and/or action set be contributed via extension points rather than require top-level plugin?