Designing Your Plug-In for Extensibility

Sun N1 Service Provisioning System software enables you to extend plug-ins, allowing you to efficiently add functionality to an existing plug-in and add this new plug-in to your Sun N1 Service Provisioning System environment. You might want to extend an existing plug-in under the following circumstances.

• You want to provision additional files or resources that are not included in the existing plug-in.

• You want to include additional steps when you provision the application handled by the plug-in..

When you extend a plug-in, you extend the XML or Java classes that are used by the existing plug-in. However, the plug-in that you want to extend must be extendable. Follow these guidelines while you develop a plug-in to make your plug-in extendable.

• Create specific component types for the components that you want to make extendable by other components.

• In the XML for your plug-in, set the value of access attribute to public for the plug-in variables that you want to make extendable.

• In the XML for your plug-in, set the value of modifer attribute to protected for the plug-in control steps that you want to make extendable.

For more information about how to extend a plug-in, see Chapter 3, Extending an Application-Specific Plug-In.