OSS Provider Control Panel

An application can plug its UI into the OSS provider control panel (OSS PCP) as explained here.

Placeholders for Navigation Tree

The OSS PCP exposes some placeholders for embedding APS UI into the following places:

• Application instance screen
• Operations Automation navigation panel on the left-hand side of the PCP
• Dashboards

To use the two last places in the list above, the PCP contains custom placeholders for plugging APS UI in addition to Placeholders. To use them, you need to enable the APS placeholders in provider panel feature.

Embedding to Application Instance Screen

One of placeholders predefined in the APS Specification allows embedding a navigation tree into the application instance screen. In the following example, metadata declaration in APP-META.xml makes the tree with the “Offers Management” label embedded into the application instance screen, as required by element <plugs-to id=”http://www.aps-standard.org/ui/application”/>.

<navigation id="pcp" label="Offers Management">
   <var name="cloud" type-id="http://aps-standard.org/samples/offer-mgmt/clouds/1.0"/>
   <plugs-to id="http://www.aps-standard.org/ui/application"/>
   <item id="offers" label="Offers">
      <view id="offers" label="Offers List">
         ...
      </view>
   </item>
</navigation>

In PCP, a plugged custom view looks as presented below.

APS UI in this case allows the provider to create and manage global resources of the application, such as offers in our example.

Embedding to Navigation Panel

It is possible to embed APS UI on the second level of the Operations Automation navigation panel.

To plug APS UI on the second level of the navigation panel, use the following placeholders in the <plugs-to> tag when declaring the navigation tree or its items:

• Operations - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/operations
• Products - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/products
• Services - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/services
• Infrastructure - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/infrastructure
• System - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/system

In the following demo declaration, two navigation items of the APS navigation tree must be embedded into the Operations folder of the Operations Automation navigation panel.

<navigation id="pcp" label="VPS Management - PCP">
    <var name="cloud" type-id="http://www.parallels.com/custom-ui-test/cloud/1.0"/>
    <plugs-to id="http://www.aps-standard.org/ui/application"/>
    <item id="samples1" label="L1 Samples 01">
         <plugs-to id="http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/operations"/>
         <view id="samples" label="Samples 1 List">
         </view>
    </item>

    <item id="samples2" label="L1 Samples 02">
        <plugs-to id="http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/operations"/>
        <view id="samples" label="Samples 2 List" src="ui/samples.html">
        </view>
    </item>

</navigation>

The following items must appear after importing the APS package and installing an APS application instance for the package.

Embedding to Dashboards

Operations Automation exposes the following placeholders to embed a navigation tree or navigation items in a dashboard:

• Cloud Infrastructure - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/services/cloud
• Web Hosting - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/services/web
• E-mail - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/services/mail
• Collaboration - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/services/collaboration
• Settings - http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/system/settings

The following example illustrates how to embed the whole APS UI tree into the Services > Infrastructure Cloud dashboard.

<navigation id="ci-pcp" label="Cloud OS Management">
   <var name="cloudos" type-id="http://www.parallels.com/infrastructure/cloudos/1.0"/>
   <plugs-to id="http://www.parallels.com/poa/pcp/services/cloud"/>
   <item id="ci-wap" label="Windows Azure Pack">
      <item id="ci-plans" label="Plans">
         <view id="ci-plans.list" src="ui/plans.list.html">
            ...
         </view>
      </item>
      <item id="ci-subscriptions" label="Subscriptions">
         <view id="ci-subscriptions.list" src="ui/subscriptions.list.html">
            ...
         </view>
      </item>
      <item id="ci-endpoints.view" label="Settings">
         <view id="ci-endpoints.view" label="Windows Azure Pack endpoints">
            ...
         </view>
      </item>
   </item>
</navigation>

The APS navigation tree with its items must appear after importing the APS package and installing an APS application instance for the package.

Breadcrumbs

PCP supports breadcrumbs when navigating through the APS custom UI.

When navigating in custom UI, breadcrumbs on top of the screen show the navigation path to the selected view. Breadcrumbs include the following navigation elements:

• The path to the placeholder in PCP where the custom UI is plugged into
• Navigation item declared in custom UI metadata
• All views that are parents of the current view

Let us consider the following navigation tree declared for Operations Automation PCP and presented by the APS IDE navigation tool here.

Navigation path to the selected New Offer view contains:

• Navigation element labeled as Offers Management
• Parent view labeled as Offers List
• Current view labeld as New Offer

Note

The intermediate item element is not visible in breadcrumbs.

In this example, Breadcrumbs in PCP will look as follows:

← Control Panel

BSS Provider Control Panel →