Building a team UI

The team UI plug-in is based on the philosophy that the team subsystem should provide simple hooks and slots for providers to add their UI implementation.  Rather than define standard team operations, the team plug-in leaves the workflow up to the provider implementation.  The team UI implements a few standard wizards and dialog pages that providers can enhance, such as the project configuration wizard, the project set export dialog, and the preferences for file types and ignored files.  More importantly, it also defines a "Team" slot for actions and preferences that serve as a single point of integration for UI contributed by provider's.  In this way, the user learns where to find all team related function.

To build a team UI, you must start with basic design work.  Identify the actions that your repository supports and in what views and editors these actions should be accessible.  The implementation for your UI is done with the standard workbench extension points.  In addition, you can define your own preferences which plug in to the standard framework.  You may even need to build your own views to present repository specific information and operations. (The CVS client implements its own views for synchronizing with the repository and navigating the repository.)

In short, building a team UI involves knowledge of a few team-specific UI classes, but is mostly accomplished using workbench UI design and development principles.

Copyright IBM Corporation and others 2000, 2003.