Historical Helpers
- Former user (Deleted)
Helpers within Sakai (2.x and before)
The following definition of helpers is taken from the documentation for Sakai Tools, most recent version dated July 12, 2005, held at sakai_tool.doc. Another source for this information is the DG: Development site within Sakai collab, which has a version at sakai_tool.pdf:
Helper Tools
Helper tools are tools that are designed to handle some smaller and common part of user interface that is found in many other tools. Examples include attachment choosers, options editors, and permissions editors.
Tools that want a helper tool to handle a particular request find the helper tool from the ActiveTool registry. They place information for the helper into the ToolSession, which is shared between the client and the helper. Then they invoke the helper tool with the ActiveTool's help() method.
A Tool can map the helper to a part of the tool's URL space. While requests come in to that space, the Tool can invoke the helper to handle the requests.
When a tool invokes a helper, the current tool PlacementId and ToolSession remain the same, that of the client tool. The client tool and the helper tool use the ToolSession to communicate. Before invoking the helper, the client places certain attributes into the ToolSession. During and after processing of the helper tool, the client can read other attributes from the ToolSession to get information back from the helper. The attributes understood by each helper are determined by each helper and documented with the tool code.