Your First Extension: A tutorial for building Design Studio 1.x and Lumira 2.x Designer extensions

Design Studio allows you – via extensions – to add any arbitrary Javascript/HTML/CSS web content to your apps and dashboards.  These extensions are not one-offs.  Rather, they become part of your palette and are always available when you are working on apps in the designer.  This tutorial series walks you through the entire process of creating a your first functional component; a configurable gauge component.  It presumes that you have Eclipse and Design Studio installed and that you know your way around Design Studio.  Prior knowledge of html, Javascript and CSS is helpful, but not mandatory.  We’ll walk you through the bits that you need to know.

There are many Design Studio SDK articles on this site and this tutorial series does not break new ground in that respect.  What it does do, is try to bring a comprehensive, systematic approach to learning how to use the SDK.  It runs through 30 individual installments, grouped into 14 “parts”, each covering a general theme.

Notes on Terminology

Dashboard and Application seem to be used interchangeably.  If there is any consensus, it might be that “dashboards” are simpler and “applications” are more complex.  There is no consensus on when a dashboard has enough complexity to be called an application.  For simplicity, since we don’t want to always write “dashboards and applications”, we’ll just call them apps here.

Likewise, “Extension” and “Plugin” are interchangeable.  Here, however, we will split hairs and make an arbitrary distinction.  An “Extension” means the web content that you’ll want to make available to Design Studio and that icon in the design palette, which the designer will access.  “Plugin” refers to the technical plumbing that you’ll need to supply to Design Studio’s Eclipse core; in order to make your extension available to the designer.  The designer of an app installs and uses an extension.  The developer of an extension makes a plugin.

Downloadable Content:

With each major milestone in the extension creation process, we’ll add a repository to Github.  They are referenced individually at the end of each post.  In addition, everything (including the final installer) are available on SAP’s open source repository on Github.

Chapters:

Setup

Part 0 – Setting Up Eclipse

Part 1 – Project Creation

Introduction to D3 and Components

Part 2a – Your first Steps with D3

Part 2b – Getting your Arc into a Component

Properties

Part 3a – Making your Arc Configurable

Part 3b – Adding Properties to the Properties Pane

Part3c – The Dark Art of Property Synchronization

Part 3d – Bringing Your Properties to Life

Additional Properties Sheet

Part 4a – Introducing the Additional Properties Sheet

Part 4b – The Positioning Visualizer

Part 4c – Putting the Positioning Visualizer into the Additional Properties Sheet

Part 4d – The APS Interacting with the Canvas

Scripting API

Part 5 – Making your Component Scriptable

Data Binding

Part 6a – Adding Property Binding: Preparation

Part 6b – Adding Property Binding

Advanced Property Types Introduced in 1.6

Part 7a – Property Arrays and Complex Properties

Part 7b – Using an Object Array to Create Conditional Formatting

Advanced Polish: Guide Lines and Arcs

Part 8a – Drawing Radial Guide Lines and Arcs with D3

Part 8b – Adding Radial Guide Lines and Arcs to the Gauge Component

Advanced Polish: Adding an Indicator Needle

Part 9a – Drawing an Indicator Needle (D3)

Part 9b – Drawing an Indicator Needle in the Component

Advanced Polish: Animations

Part 10a – The “data” in Data Driven Documents

Part 10b – Transitions in D3

Part 10c – Transitions in the Component

Advanced Polish: Dynamic Text Callouts

Part 11a – D3 and the SVG Text Element

Part 11b – Dynamic Text Positioning with D3

Part 11c – Text callouts in the Component

Advanced Polish: Custom Component CSS Styling

Part 12 – Cascading Stylesheets in Custom Components

Infrastructure: RequireJS

Part 13 – RequireJS

Creating an Installer Zip File

Part 14 – Zipit ‘n Shipit