The Windchill adapter is an embedded component of the Windchill method server. The Windchill adapter receives requests to execute Info*Engine tasks and webjects. Webjects can perform various functions, including the following:

Query and action webjects are specialized for each adapter that is used to access and alter data in an information system. These and other categories of webjects are further described in the section Info*Engine User’s Guide, which also describes how to create custom webjects.

You can provide custom query and action webjects for use with the Windchill adapter.

Each webject delegate must have a unique name. The Windchill adapter uses this name along with any class information provided by the webject to locate a class implementing your webject delegate. All type-aware webject delegates must implement the com.ptc.core.adapter.server.impl.TypeAwareWebjectDelegate interface, which provides the following method:

This invoke() method performs all the work of each concrete webject delegate class implementing the TypeAwareWebjectDelegate interface.

The following is the basic outline of operation for an implementation of the invoke() method:

For more information on the com.infoengine.object.factory.Task class, refer to its javadoc.

Webject delegates are registered with the Windchill adapter by entries in wt.adapter.delegates.properties. The Windchill adapter invokes webject delegates based on the webject name and the class or type of the target object.

For example, the following line in wt.adapter.delegates.properties registers the CheckinObjectsWebjectDelegate with the Windchill adapter:

The class (or Windchill subtype) of the target object is taken from the TYPE parameter of the incoming webject. Hyphens included in the webject name by the caller are ignored, and the webject lookup is also case-insensitive.

This performs the following functions:

Most Windchill adapter webjects reside in the com.ptc.core.adapter.server.impl package. For simplicity, the Windchill adapter webjects are not modeled. Most webject subclasses have common parent classes that based on the type of adapter webject.

Each class provides useful convenience methods and parameter support applicable to the type of webject being written. Subclasses of any of these also inherit the TypeAwareWebjectDelegate interface. Subclasses need only implement the invoke() method.

For a detailed list of methods available to each, refer to the javadoc for com.ptc.core.adapter.server.impl.

Windchill adapter webjects drive parameter gathering and validation by use of core Info*Engine Java annotations. This ensures that all webjects process input parameters as consistently as possible, report consistent error messages, and do not need to duplicate source code for routine tasks.

If you make use of existing super classes (ObjectWebject, ActionWebject, or AbstractWebject), each class defines the parameters that it gathers and uses, so subclasses need only define the parameters that they specifically use that are not already being gathered by a parent class. Webject parameter validation can then perform all basic validation of things such as the following:

This leaves only basic parameter validation to the webject implementation itself.

If you decide to extend an existing base class, then the first thing your class should do in its invoke method implementation is to call the parent class' preset method. This validates parameters and gathers common parameters.

If you do not decide to extend a common base class, then you must either force parameter validation yourself (if using annotations) or manually gather parameters from the webject.

The annotations that are used for parameter validation are com.infoengine.object.factory.WebjectDef and com.infoengine.object.factory.ParameterDef.. For more information, see the examples in the following topics.