Custom types for Developing Components

Question

I am creating the custom component for the LiveCycle and I ran into problems, because there are no sufficient documentation how to define and use a custom data types. I have read your article from the DevNet and you refer to the documentation many times. I was very disappointed, because the documentation isn’t handle the custom data types like you have described it. My problem is how to define the custom data type in the component xml. The structure of the custom data type is
ScanProperties
private String virusScanPath
private Priority priority (Enum type)
private Action action (Enum type)
private boolean all
private boolean allole
private boolean archive
private boolean mime
private boolean mheur
private boolean pheur
I will use this custom data type as an input for my service. So my main problem is how I can define the correct set up of the object from the process using the correct editors?
Posted on behalf of Veijo (last name withheld)

Answer 1

Usually custom data types (such as the priority and action types you stated) are added to the component.xml file using the data-types element. 
For example, I have created several custom types (Part, OrderResult, PartsOrdered, Pricing and PartColor) that I want to expose in LiveCycle.  I want the user to be able to select these types from the drop down when they create process variables inside Workbench.  This is done by adding the class’ for each type to the data-types tag:
      <data-types>
            <data-type id="com.adobe.samples.customTypes.Part" title="Part" standard="true">
            </data-type>
            <data-type id="com.adobe.samples.customTypes.OrderResult" title="Part Order Result" standard="true">
            </data-type>
            <data-type id="com.adobe.samples.customTypes.PartsOrdered" title="Parts Ordered" standard="true">
            </data-type>
            <data-type id="com.adobe.samples.customTypes.Pricing" title="Pricing" standard="true">
            </data-type>
            <data-type id="com.adobe.samples.customTypes.PartColor" title="PartColor" standard="true">
            </data-type>
      </data-types>
The data-type attributes are:
  id - Required. The identifier used to look up a data type globally (across components). Its maximum length is 255.
  title - Short descriptive caption expected to be displayed in any related UI. The title is not defined if id is used in place of title.
  java-class - The underlying Java type for this data type that will be used internally and on the signature of an operation when used as input and output. If java-class is not defined, it is assumed that id is the Java class.
  standard - A Boolean flag specifying whether this data type is a standard data type. If true, it is expected that applications such as Workbench ES will show this data type by default and not require a search across the data type registry. The default is false.
I also see that you want to use an enumerated type.  I’ll assume that you would like to see a drop down in the properties sheet that allows the user to select from a list of possible values.  To do that you want to use a property-editor with the type Enum in your input parameter section:
<property-editor editor-id="com.adobe.idp.dsc.propertyeditor.system.Enum" />
I’ve included a sample component.xml (the same one from my DevNet article) that should supply you with the context of the elements.