extending eclipse process designer plugin

[paulharrington]

I am looking at extending the process designer eclipse plugin to add extra functionality.

Specifically, in the visual diagram editor I would like to add extra buttons to the list of nodes available ('start', 'state', 'fork', 'join', etc). The extra buttons would represent my own pre-defined nodes / tasks which would be extensions of the standard node. I would like provide the ability to be able to drag and drop these nodes onto to the process diagram in the normal way.

I was wondering if anyone could help out with the following questions:

- Does anyone have experience of extending the plugin? Would it be simple or complex task to do?

- Is there any specific documentation available on how this could be implemented?

Any other help/suggestions on the topic would be most welcome

thanks

Paul Harrington

[sunilramaiah]

Hello Paul,

I am trying to do the same task, but could not find any documentation. Did you find anything about this ? Please let me know.

Thanks,
Sunil.

[paulharrington]

Hi Sunil,

I haven't found out anything yet I'm afraid. However if and when I do, I will let you know

thanks

Paul

[koen.aers]

Hi Paul and Sunil,

Extending the designer is not really easy at the moment. There are a couple of extension points that allow you to do these kinds of things, but they are not documented and will probably change in the future. Have a look at the plugin.xml file of the org.jbpm.gd.jpdl.ui project.
You will find the 'editPolicies' and 'graphElements' extension points. You can see how they are used in the following excerpts:

<graphElement
 name="state"
 contributor="org.jbpm.ui.contributor.StateContributor">
 <entry
 category="org.jbpm.palette.1.BasicNodeTools"
 id="org.jbpm.ui.palette.2.State"
 label="State"
 tooltip="Creates a State node"
 type="node"/>
 </graphElement>

<editPolicy
 id="org.jbpm.ui.NodeComponentEditPolicy"
 part="org.jbpm.ui.part.graph.NodeGraphicalEditPart"
 policy="org.jbpm.ui.policy.NodeComponentEditPolicy"
 role="ComponentEditPolicy"/>

Certainly the use of the 'editPolicy' extension point (which serves to modify and customize the way graphical objects react to user input) requires a fair amount of GEF knowledge.

Hopefully this helps.

Regards,
Koen