More about Harnesses

Use harnesses to define the appearance and processing of user forms used in your application to create work items and process assignments.

Linked property references

For fields that are always displayed as read-only, you can enter a linked property reference, of the form .AAAA.BBBB, where AAAA is the linked property and BBBB is any property reference in the object identified by the value of AAAA as a key.

For example, if the property AAAA has a value corresponding to a key of a Data-Admin-Operator-ID instance, then .AAAA.pyUserName presents that Operator ID's full name.

This allows values from that object to display (read-only) in the run-time display of the section, although your processing does not explicitly load the object onto the clipboard.

Activities and clipboard page names

Use the standard activity @baseclass.Show-Harness to display harness forms. This activity and the standard harnesses expect to find (by convention) objects on the following page names:

  • pyWorkPage — Conventional name for the page that contains a work item. This page usually has a class derived from the Work-Object- class.
  • pyWorkCover — Conventional name for the page that contains a covering work item, if one exists. This page has a class derived from the Work-Cover- class.
  • NewAssignPag — Conventional name for the page that contains an assignment object. This page has a class derived from the Assign- base class.
Note: These page name conventions do not apply to applications that do not depend on harnesses, because the work item page can have any name established in the flow.

You can view the generated Java code of a rule by clicking Actions > View Java. You can use this code to debug your application or to examine how rules are implemented.

Preview and Run

After you save this rule form, select the Preview toolbar action to see a more faithful split-screen presentation of the runtime appearance of the harness.

Note: Many harnesses depend on context. Even when the rule is correctly configured, the Preview display may fail and report JSP errors if this harness depends on clipboard contents that do not exist or other rules that cannot be found.

Select the Run toolbar action to test the harness with data from the clipboard.

As with the Layout tab, the system renders both the Preview and Run displays using the styles of the skin rule identified in the Using skin preference. If the Using skin field is blank, these displays use the styles marked Work on the Styles tab of the skin identified in your current portal rule.

Parent class

Through directed inheritance, the immediate parent class of the Rule-HTML-Harness class is the Rule-Obj-HTML class.

Security

If your application rulesets contain harnesses that are not auto-generated, run the Rule Security Analyzer before locking a ruleset version, to look for possible security issues.