Windchill Client Architecture Common Objects Overview

This section provides a basic overview of common Windchill Client Architecture objects used in the UI.

These objects will be heavily used in customizations but are not likely to be extended except for NmSimpleOid.

NmCommandBean provides Windchill Client Architecture state information to other Windchill Client Architecture layers. It is the what, where, and how of the UI. It wraps the request object and adds value by parsing the parameters into related items.

Once initialized by the request, the NmCommandbean can answer Windchill Client Architecture related questions. It essentially carries the request and helper methods to access the jca state information.

Interesting attributes:

• Context: the where compcontext, parentContext, element context, etc are used to determine what page is displayed and where actions are launched. (Note that this is becoming obsolete and should be deprecated in the next release.)

Contains a number of helper APIs:

• getPageOid(): gets object that the page is being displayed in this page.

• getViewingContainer() : gets the container that the page is displayed in.

See the javadoc for more info api usages.

NmAction represents a line from actions.xml which describes a page in Windchill. It is rendered as all the icons and links that one can click to make changes to the Windchill system. Each jsp page should be described by an NmAction in an xml file. The localized attributes of the NmAction can be found in the action.properties or other rbInfo files.

A Netmarkets version of a WTReference that hides some details of the different reference types and provides helper apis to aid in caching. Furthermore, it is the object that understands how to parse any string format from the request that represents an object in the db.

NmSimpleOid represents a non-persisted business object. It is often to represent some item that has not been created yet or some object that wraps a persistable with more information. String parsing of the NmSimpleOid is completely handled by the code for the relevant table and actions and should be in an NmObjectUtility. See NmObject Utilities for more information.

NmContext represents a UI address of a page. (Note that this is becoming obsolete and should be deprecated in the next release.)