How heritage coaches work (deprecated)

Before you customize heritage coaches, you should have a good understanding of how they work to ensure that your customization produces the results you want.

The runtime rendering of a heritage coach involves the following key technologies:

Table 1. Key technologies involved in a runtime rendering of a heritage coach
Technology Description
XML The design of a heritage coach is described in Extensible Markup Language (XML). As you drag sections and controls to a heritage coach, IBM® BPM automatically generates the XML definition of the heritage coach. You can view the XML while you're building a heritage coach by clicking the Code View icon in the toolbar.
XSLT The Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformation (XSLT) transforms the XML definition to the runtime HTML form. The XLS renders a server-side-scriptlet that is run to generate the HTML.
HTML The client (web browser) renders the HTML that the heritage coach generates from its XML definition through XSLT processing.
CSS The Cascading Style Sheet (coach_designer.css in the following image) instructs the client how to render the HTML output.
JavaScript JavaScript provides the methods and functions that implement runtime heritage coach features, such as dynamically adding rows to a table or governing the visibility of heritage coach controls. JavaScript that is embedded in the XML definition of a heritage coach is evaluated by the runtime engine before it is rendered to HTML by the web browser client. Both client-side and server-side JavaScript is used to render heritage coaches.
A Developer generates the XML definition of a heritage coach by generating files, for example CoachDesigner.xls, Coach_designer.js, and coach_designer.css files. Those files are then rendered, in an HTML format, to the user in the heritage coach client. The following image shows how heritage coaches are generated:
How a heritage coach is rendered

If you have the required technical expertise, you can use the following methods to customize heritage coaches:

  • Override and customize Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
  • Edit the XML definition
  • Edit the JavaScript files
  • Edit the XSL transformation rules

The following topics describe some of the customization options most commonly used for heritage coaches.