Overview of the ContainerProviders

To support the container providers, the PAPI includes three APIs, the ContainerProvider interface, the ContainerProviderAdapter class, and the ContainerProviderContext interface. This section provides an overview of these three APIs.

ContainerProvider Interface

The ContainerProvider interface defines the interface for implementing a container provider and is the programmatic entity for generating container channels.

A container provider has a selected and available channels list, and allows getting and setting of these lists. Selected channels are those that are considered active on the Desktop. Available channels are those that are available to be activated on the Desktop. That is, selected channels are those that are available and selected for display on the Desktop by the user; available channels are those that are available for display on the Desktop, but not selected for display on the Desktop by the user.

The Desktop container providers (such as JSPSingleContainerProvider, JSPTableContainerProvider, and JSPTabContainerProvider) discussed in this chapter extend the JSPContainerProviderAdapter that implements the ContainerProvider interface.

The ContainerProvider includes interfaces to get/setAvailableChannels and get/setSelectedChannels. See the Javadocs for more information.