Advanced Customization
  
Advanced Customization
In this section, we’ll get into advanced customization, including building custom tasks from scratch. These topics are intended for PTC Windchill system administrators and application developers who are using ThingWorx Composer.
To customize tasks, you’ll need some prerequisite knowledge:
• Working knowledge of your Windchill instance
• Working knowledge of ThingWorx Composer
• For some functionality, you may need to know how to write Java script.
Need some more background information on building mashups in ThingWorx Composer? These video tutorials may be helpful.
We’ll start off with a step-by-step example for building a custom task. Then, you can use those principles and examples to plan and build tasks for your own organization. Next, you’ll find more information about adding functionality to your task. For example, adding saved Windchill filters to searches.
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ThingWorx Navigate 1.5 and later include a new Windchill connector, WindchillSwaggerConnector. ThingWorx Navigate supports multiple connectors. So if you created custom tasks in ThingWorx Navigate 1.4 or earlier, make sure they are connected to WindchillConnector, and that you create new tasks using WindchillSwaggerConnector.
Many functions are no longer supported on the older WindchillConnector, including these:
• Content proxy
• WebGL viewer—The viewer that powers the Creo View widget
We recommend that you recreate the tasks using the new connector, and that your services call directly on the connector rather than going through the resource providers. For more information, see Use Windchill REST Web Services to Develop Your Task.
If your existing custom tasks use Info*Engine tasks, check the upgrade information in Upgrade a Custom Task that has Info*Engine Tasks.
• To customize one of our out-of-the-box entities, copy it and use the customized copy as a template.
• If you want to customize ThingWorx Navigate out-of-the-box entities, it is your responsibility to track the changes:
◦ Use your own source-controlled exported entities.
◦ Use tags to be able to collectively find and recognize all your updated entities.
◦ After upgrade, you have to recreate (by importing manually) your changes if you need to adapt them to the new version.