Rational Team Concert Extensions Workshop

Introduction

This is an update to the RTC 3.0.1 Extension Workshop. The workshop was initially created and delivered at the IBM/Rational Innovate 2010 User Conference. Participant feedback, and the stream of customer questions regarding Rational Team Concert (RTC) Extensibility led us to publishing it here on Jazz.net.

This workshop was initially developed on Windows with RTC 3.0 and the “look and feel” of the labs may change if you do them with a different version of RTC, or on a different platform. Users have been able to do these labs on Linux, with some minor changes for pathnames and a couple of other typical Linux changes. 

The workshop packaging and workbook was updated to address various issues that users experienced during setup.  For example the new version is now compatible and can be used with all 4.x Versions of RTC. The temporary licenses of the RTC server will not be expired and the setup process is less manual. To address this, the new version of the workshop provides a tool that uses the Plain Java Client Libraries to populate the RTC server with the development data. This change allows to run the workshop against any 4.0.x version of RTC. It has been tested with several versions up to 4.0.6. This also makes the code for the extension developed in the workshop available as archive files without having to set up the workshop RTC instance. 

If you experience problems with this workshop, please  ask for help in the forum and tag your question with the tag extending.

The Extensibility Workshop shows how you can easily extend and enhance the capabilities of Jazz. While you don’t need to be a Java developer to do this lab, Java development experience is helpful in your ability to understand this workshop. The labs in this workshop explain in some detail what the Java code is doing, so if you are a more experienced Java developer you may wish to skim over these sections.

Update: The workshop has been successfully used with any 4.0.x version. It also works with RTC 5.0.x and is expected to run with any of these versions. The only remarkable difference in the RTC 5.0.x versions is that the Problems view shows two errors related to the External Plug-in Libraries. The error does however not prevent the workshop from working. It gets into the way however for example during refactoring operations. You can delete the folder resources in the SDK folder installs/rtc-sdk/plugins/com.ibm.team.log4j.ui_1.2.0.v20140307_1622 after extracting the SDK. Otherwise ignore the error and, when launching the Jetty server or the Eclipse client ignore it and permit the launch to continue.

To run the workshop download the workshop files below

The Workshop

These labs will help guide you in the creation and enhancement of an RTC process extension. Lab 1 guides you through the setup of your development environment. The remaining labs will help you quickly create and deploy a typical extension for RTC. You will see it working in a debug environment, and be able to test your new extension. You will then enhance the operation of the extension by providing parameters and error checking that will make the extension easier to configure, maintain, and consume.

In order to complete and get the most out of this workshop, it is recommended that you are already familiar with RTC as a user. Of particular help would be familiarity with work items, build definitions and basic process customization. In addition, you should be familiar with Java programming and debugging using Eclipse. Some familiarity with Eclipse plug-in programming would also be helpful but is not strictly required.


For more information


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