Creating the plug-in components

You can create plug-ins to add components such as menus, services, widgets, and layouts to IBM Content Navigator.

Creating a menu action
You can create a plug-in to provide an action to use in IBM Content Navigator. For example, you might define a custom action that imports documents or that generates a custom report generation for a set of selected documents. This action can be added to toolbars and context menus.
Creating a menu
You can create a plug-in to provide a custom toolbar or context menu to use in IBM Content Navigator.
Creating a feature
You can create a plug-in to add a major feature to IBM Content Navigator. For example, you might create a feature to show statistical data on content usage or a summary of recent document activity. You might also create a feature or to select documents for archival. This feature can be displayed with the features that are provided by IBM Content Navigator such as favorites, browse, search, and administration.
Creating feature icons
The feature icons that are used in IBM Content Navigator are Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images. These icons can be recolored at run time by using colors that are specified in your theme CSS. You can create your own SVG icons.
Creating a layout
You can create a plug-in to provide a custom layout to use in IBM Content Navigator. The layout defines the arrangement of the widgets that are used in a desktop.
Creating a repository type
You can create a plug-in for a custom repository type to authenticate, search, and provide result sets for repository servers. For example, you might want to use a custom repository type to extend IBM Content Navigator for your client application to use repositories that do not store documents. The custom repository type enables repository-specific authentication and other actions for your repository server.
Creating a request or response filter
You can create a plug-in to filter a request that is made to a service or to filter a response that is received from a service. For example, you might create a request filter to modify the parameters that are sent to a service to provide custom validations and error handling. You can also create a request filter to override a service. For example, you might create a response filter to apply custom formatting to the data that is received from a service before the data is displayed.
Creating a service
You can create a plug-in to define a service that performs operations on a content server. For example, you can create a service that provides a viewer for specific document types on a IBM FileNet® P8 server.
Creating a viewer
You can create a plug-in to provide a custom viewer. Administrators can then map the custom viewer to document types by using the IBM Content Navigator administration tool.
Creating a widget
You can create a widget to provide the user interface for your plug-in. For example, you might create a widget that enables users to run a custom action. You also might create a widget to enable administrators to configure the plug-in.

Parent topic: Creating plug-ins to IBM Content Navigator