5 Working with Design Patterns and Guided Assistance
This chapter provides information about design patterns and guided assistance.
About Design Patterns
In Design Studio, design patterns are wizards that can be run to apply sets of resources to a Design Studio workspace and that can be used to deliver complex sets of preconfigured artifacts that serve some domain-specific function. They enable you to formalize modeling patterns into reusable components that can be applied to various solutions, and reduce the time and effort required during implementation.
During solution design, designers often create and configure complex sets of related entities and the relationships among them. These sets of tasks can be documented as best practices and can be used as templates, or design patterns, for reproducing the configuration.
Design patterns enable automation of complex, repeatable tasks, and enable team members with varying levels of skill to complete these tasks. For example, a solution implementation team can develop design patterns to enable network engineers to manage VPN-related tasks, such as creating and deleting VPNs, adding sites and removing sites, and so forth.
Typically, designers create design patterns using groups of design artifacts identified from existing implementations. Designers package the design patterns and distribute them to solution design teams. Solution design teams can install a design pattern as a Design Studio feature and, using a wizard, apply the pattern to their workspace. These wizards ensure compliance with the best practices and reduce the need for coding and complex configuration. Your teams can use design patterns to reduce errors, simplify modeling, and increase productivity.
See Design Studio Developer's Guide for more information about creating custom design patterns. See Design Studio Help for more information about applying design patterns.
About Guided Assistance
Design Studio guided assistance is a range of context-sensitive learning aides mapped to specific editors and views in the user interface. For example, when working in editors, you can open the Guided Assistance dialog box for Help topics, cheat sheets, and recorded presentations that are applicable to that editor.
When working with guided assistance, you can review the learning aids delivered with Design Studio, and you can create your own and map them to projects and entities by using design patterns or by defining values for attributes directly in the guided assistance extension point.
See Design Studio Developer's Guide for more information about guided assistance.
About Cheat Sheets
Design Studio supports cheat sheets, which refers to the integration of documented procedures with wizards in the application. Cheat Sheets are XML documents that can be interpreted by the Eclipse Cheat Sheet framework, and developers can map cheat sheets to specific points in the Design Studio user interface (for example, in editors and views). Users can access the cheat sheets that are relevant to current tasks, and complete those tasks using the included instructions. You can configure cheat sheets to provide links to relevant Help topics and facilitate the learning of those procedures.
For example, you can use cheat sheets with design patterns to describe the resources added to a workspace, and to assist users with any manual steps required after a design pattern is applied. Cheat sheets are not mandatory for design patterns, but recommended.
You can develop and edit cheat sheets using the Eclipse Cheat Sheet editor.
See Design Studio Developer's Guide for more information about cheat sheets.