Windchill ESI VDB Builder support is a set of classes that build Info*Engine VDB with a defined structure: These are the classes:

This interface declares the methods that all VDB builders must implement. Refer Windchill release specific Java Documentation for more details on available methods in the class

Creates an instance of the correct implementation of the VdbBuilder interface. Refer to the Windchill release specific Java documentation for more details on available attributes and methods in the class.

This class is the default Windchill ESI VdbBuilder implementation. It is extendable. Refer to the Windchill release specific Java documentation for more details on available attributes and methods in the class.

Manages a collection of VdbGroup objects and renders them as an Info*Engine Collection. This class is not intended to be extended by customizers. Refer to the Windchill release specific Java documentation for more details on available attributes and methods in the class.

Manages a collection of VdbElements and renders the contents as an Info*Engine group. This class is not intended to be extended. Refer to the Windchill release specific Java documentation for more details on available attributes and methods in the class.

Manages the contents of an Info*Engine element. Refer to the Windchill release specific Java documentation for more details on available attributes and methods in the class.

Windchill ESI services invoke the VDB builder using classes called renderers. The renderers are described in the following sections of this document:

The following UML sequence diagram shows the message flow involved in the use of a Windchill ESI services renderer:

As seen in the above figure, the client creates an ESIRendererFactory instance and invokes getRenderer() on it to fetch the renderer of the required type. It then invokes getXXX() on the fetched renderer for a given ERP instance or destination (for example, when rendering a CN, it invokes getECN(). The getXXX() method then creates a VdbBuilder instance and invokes an overloaded version of getXXX() for every target belonging to the given instance. The overloaded version calls update() on the VdbBuilder instance (which sets the currentTarget attribute to the currently processed distribution target), and then the setData() and render() methods on the renderer. The render() method calls setBuilder(), validate() and buildGroups(). The response is then built using a call to addElement() on the VdbBuilder instance. The I*E Collection that represents the response is then fetched through a call to as VDB(), which is then returned to the client.

Windchill ESI services provide an abstract class and an interface that define common capabilities of all Windchill ESI services renderers (see above). These are the methods provided:

This interface is implemented by all Windchill ESI renderers and the only method it provides is public void render(VdbBuilder), which is described below.

render(builder : VdbBuilder)

This method populates the passed VdbBuilder instance with appropriate content. It throws the ESIRendererException if the data used to initialize the renderer is found to be invalid or if some error occurs while building the output.

Subclass of ESIException (and therefore of WTException) which allows clients to determine that the exception was thrown by an ESIRenderer.

This is an abstract base class containing generally useful behavior for all Windchill ESI XML response renderers. The class is abstract and therefore must be extended.

Refer to the Windchill release specific Java documentation for more details on available attributes and methods in the class.

adjustTargets(element : Element, targets : Collection)

For each ESITarget entry in the targets argument, the method creates a new Info*Engine Att object and adds it to the element argument. The Att object is named “TargetID” and is assigned the value returned by the getTargetId() API of class ESITargetUtility.