Creating a pattern archive

Package your user-defined pattern as a pattern archive so that you can distribute it to pattern users.

Before you begin

Before you can complete this task, you must have completed the following tasks:

About this task

When you have tested your user-defined pattern and you are satisfied with its content and quality, package it into a pattern archive so that you can distribute it to your pattern users.
You can include additional plug-in projects in your pattern archive. For example, if your user-defined pattern includes a user-defined editor, you can include the code plug-in project that contains the code for the editor in your pattern archive. If you want to include a JAR archive package in your pattern archive, you must first convert the JAR file to a plug-in. To convert a JAR file to a plug-in, complete the following steps:
  1. Click File > New > Other.
  2. Expand Plug-in Development and select Plug-in from Existing JAR Archives.
  3. Click Next to start the New Plug-in from Existing JAR Archives wizard. Navigate through the wizard, completing the fields as required. Click Finish.
If the code in the JAR plug-in is required by a code plug-in in your user-defined pattern, you must ensure that the MANIFEST.MF file of your code plug-in includes a dependency to the JAR plug-in.

Procedure

To package your user-defined pattern into a pattern archive, complete the following tasks:

  1. Open your pattern instance project, click the Create Pattern tab.
  2. In the Pattern Distribution section, click Create Pattern Archive.
    The "Create a Pattern Archive" window opens.

    The File name defaults to the first segment of the pattern project name appended by .patternzip

  3. To select a location, click Browse, and navigate to the required location.
    The Location is the file system location to which the pattern archive is saved. If you want to publish the pattern archive directly to a pattern community shared file system location to which you have write access, select that location.
  4. Select any additional plug-in projects from your workspace that you want to include in the pattern archive.
    Only plug-in projects are displayed in the list.
  5. Click Finish.
    A progress monitor is displayed at the bottom of the window.
    • If you click Cancel while the creation process is being run, the progress monitor stops and a warning message is displayed saying that the operation has stopped and the pattern archive will not be created. You can choose to restart the creation process by clicking Finish, or cancel the creation process by clicking Cancel. If the pattern archive has already been created, it is removed from the target location and its resources are deleted from the workspace. If you click Cancel again, the window is closed.
    • If an error occurs during the creation process, for example, the disk is full, or a write access permissions problem has occurred, an error message is displayed. You can correct the problem without exiting the window, and try again.
    If the process completes successfully, the window closes.

Results

The pattern plug-ins and features are generated in the workspace. If the plug-ins already exist in the workspace, you are asked if you want to overwrite them; if you have already created the .doc plug-in or your translated files, you might choose not to overwrite the plug-ins. The pattern is temporarily displayed in the Patterns Explorer view. A pattern archive with the extension .patternzip is created in the target location.

What to do next

  • If you published the pattern archive directly to a pattern community shared file system location, pattern users can now download the pattern archive, see Downloading from a shared file system.
  • If you did not publish the pattern archive directly to a pattern community shared file system location, you can upload the pattern archive to a pattern community site to distribute the pattern archive to pattern users, see Uploading a pattern archive.