Feature elements

The feature element concept enables you to design presentations where the availability of various features will depend on who is logged in. In order for feature elements to work, they must be interfaced throughout your web application design. For complete details about how feature elements are used in your application, see the developer documentation for your e-Business Suite product.

The list of feature elements available to an application is provided by the Feature Elements item on the Application Properties tab of the Infor e-Commerce Development Studio. Here, you are able to view and edit a list that specifies each feature element name and assigns an integer key value to each.

The feature elements list is used both at run time and design time:

• At design time, you are able to view the full list of current feature elements whenever you configure a Group Component with expansion criteria based on a RoleCheck Component. This makes it easy for you to formulate expansion criteria based on feature elements by using the Group Component’s Custom Value property builder.

• At run time, a RoleCheck Component provides a component value for each feature element, specifying whether or not the current user has access to each of them. Feature element access is stored as part of each user’s profile; however, only the key values for each feature element are stored. Whenever the actual feature element names are required at run time, the key values must be matched to the names stored in the configuration repository (a pipeline stage — AddFeatureElementList — is provided to do this).

To view and/or edit the list of feature elements used on your presentation, select Feature Elements from the Application Properties tab. The feature elements are shown in the Properties Editor (usually at the bottom of the Eclipse IDE).

Usually you should not edit or remove any of the standard feature elements used by your web application, though you can do so by selecting an item in the list, editing the Key and Value fields. To delete a feature element, select a feature element then click the minus sign.

You might, more typically, decide to add new feature elements at the bottom of the list. To do so, click the plus sign, then type an integer in the Key field and the feature element name in the Value field. The Key value must be unique for each feature element in an application. Consider using a very high Key value for feature elements that you add; this will avoid conflicting with new feature elements that might appear in future versions of your web application, thereby making upgrading easier. Though it is not strictly required, your solution will be easier to work with if you use unique feature element names as well.