IBM BPM, V8.0.1, All platforms > Authoring services in Integration Designer > Advanced development topics > Customize behavior with visual snippets
Custom behavior
There are situations when you have the opportunity to specify custom behavior within the context of one of the IBM Integration Designer family of tools.
The IBM Integration Designer family have been designed so that users can compose integrative business solutions with minimal programming skills. One example of this is the visual snippet editor that you can use to graphically compose customized behavior as snippets of Java™ code.
Before you start to use the visual snippet editor, you need to understand these key concepts:
An example of customized behavior
Perhaps you are composing a process in the process editor, and you need to modify your data in a way that the available activities do not provide. In such a case, you could use the visual snippet editor to create some customized behavior to make the process do exactly what you want it to do.
There are three different kinds of implementations that you can use within the editor:
- Standard visual snippets
- These snippets have been predefined for your general use. Their implementation is fixed and cannot be viewed or modified by the user.
- Java visual snippet
- Use this snippet to embed a call to an arbitrary Java method directly into your diagram. Visual Java Snippets can also be used to invoke constructors and access fields.
- Custom visual snippets
- Use this to create a snippet that captures a specific behavior. It can then be used within other snippets.
Business roles and customizing activities
An activity is unit of work or a building block that performs a specific, discrete programmatic tasks. These activities can be created and customized using the visual snippet editor, and stored within the existing libraries. As such, it is possible for activities to be created, customized and ultimately used by several users of varying technical backgrounds, as the following graphic illustrates:
Figure 1. An example of using the library to avoid the replication of work.
In this example, the first user has extensive technical skills and a sound knowledge and background in the business in question. This user determines what customized activities are likely to be needed, creates them, and stores them in a library. The second user is able to easily access and use these custom activities without having to know why and how they were created. Using this system, there is no reproducing the same work.