Preparing your system for Component SDK development

After installing the Component SDK, before you can start development, you must complete some initial preparation on your system.

This includes:

Extracting the Studio .ear file and portal .war file
Configuring build files to point to the directories for these extracted files
Optionally, enabling JavaScript minification for custom components.
If minification is enabled, then files in the docroot/js directory of custom components are minifiied.

To prepare your system for custom component development:

Extract the Studio .ear file and portal .war file:
1. From the Big Data Discovery Media Pack, download the .ear file.
2. Extract the .ear file to a directory on your machine.
3. From that directory, extract the file endeca-portal.war to a directory within the extracted .ear file directory.
For example, if the .ear file is extracted to /bdd_ear, the contents of the extracted .war file might be in /bdd_ear/portal/.
Next, in the Component SDK, create and configure the build properties files:
1. Go to the components directory of the Component SDK.
2. In the components directory, create a file called build.<user>.properties, where <user> is the user name that you use to log in to the current machine.
  
  For example, if your user name is jsmith, then you would create a file called build.jsmith.properties.
3. Add the following properties to build.<user>.properties:
```
portal.base.dir=<extracted .ear file directory>
app.server.lib.global.dir=<extracted .ear file directory>/APP-INF/lib
app.server.portal.dir=<extracted portal .war file directory>
war.output.dir=<directory for generated components>
```
  The war.output.dir setting indicates where the build process should place the .war file that it generates when you compile a custom component. This can be any directory on your system.
  So for example, if:
  - You extracted the .ear file to a directory called /bdd_ear
  - You extracted the portal .war file to a portal directory in /bdd_ear
  - You want the generated .war files for custom components to be placed in /generated_components
  the settings would be:
```
portal.base.dir=/bdd_ear
app.server.lib.global.dir=/bdd_ear/APP-INF/lib
app.server.portal.dir=/bdd_ear/portal
war.output.dir=/generated_components
```
4. In the components directory, create a file called build.shared.properties.
5. In build.shared.properties, add the following property:
```
portal.base.dir=<extracted .ear file directory>
```
To enable JavaScript minification when building custom components:
1. If you haven't already, obtain the required YUI Compressor .jar file. See Requirements for using the Component SDK.
2. In the components directory of the Component SDK, update build.<user>.properties to add the following property:
```
yui.compressor.jar=<path to YUI Compressor .jar file>
```

In Eclipse, create the following Eclipse classpath variables:

Name	Path
`DF_GLOBAL_LIB`	Path to the application server global library, which is: `<extracted .ear file directory>`/APP-INF/lib
`DF_PORTAL_LIB`	Path to the Web application library, which is: `<extracted portal .war file directory>`