Common Properties

The list of common properties for a <Provider> definition and their description is provided below. In addition to the following properties, there are properties that are used in specific providers. For example, the lines and maxLines properties are required by the notes provider code.

title

Specifies the title that appears in the channel title bar in the Desktop.

description

The description is displayed on the content page to give the user a little more information about what the channel is more. For example:

title: Bookmarks description: manage your portal-specific bookmarks

refreshTime

The refreshTime property controls how often a channel’s content is reloaded.

editType

Specifies the edit type, either edit_complete or edit_subset. If edit_complete, the provider’s getEdit() method is responsible for generating the complete Edit page content. If edit_subset, a generic edit provider container is used to put a frame around the Edit page. The provider’s getEdit() page is then called, and displays the content of the Edit page.

isEditable

Determines if the provider has an edit view. If true, the Edit button is generated in the channel title bar. By clicking the Edit button, users can display an Edit page and customize channel settings such as whether the channel is minimized or detached. The Edit page is generated by the Provider.getEdit() method.

If isEditable is false, no edit view is provided and no Edit button is generated in the title bar and users cannot change the settings for the channel. To implement an editable provider, the default no-operation implementations of ProviderAdapter.getEdit() and ProviderAdapter.processEdit() must be overridden.

If the provider has the getEdit() and processEdit() methods defined, you can change the value of isEditable from false to true to cause the Edit button to appear in the channel title bar.

width

A channel’s width setting is a suggestion for containing channels as to how much screen real estate the channel may require. This value is only a suggestion; a container is not required to utilize this value for its contained channels. Possible values are thin, thick, full_top, or full_bottom. In general, these values only make sense for an HTML-based Desktop.

helpURL

Specifies the online help URL, which can be either a fully qualified URL value or a relative path to the doc root location. For example, the online help URL for the bookmark channel is:

http://hostname:port/portal/docs/en/desktop/bkmark.html

This URL could also be defined as desktop/bmark.html. In this case, the provider context code figures out the doc root and the user locale, and locates the online help URL.

A return value of null signifies that this provider does not have a help page.

To have the provider code not generate a Help icon on the title bar for the channel, use a value of “”.

fontFace1

Specifies the default font face for the channel, for example, Sans-serif.

productName

Specifies the name of the product, for example, Sun Java System Portal Server. This is not required by all providers.

Required properties and their values for the <Provider> definition are based on the Provider interface. The required properties are necessary for the provider code if the provider class extends ProviderAdapter or the ProfileProviderAdapter class. Note that the channel can set its own properties that override these values.