NBI Platform-Specific Properties

The concept of platform-specific properties is very simple and derives from an analogous concept of resolving localized resource bundles in java. It applies to the properties of wizard components and product components. If a client requests a property and has the special flag set (default) then the properties handling entity will try to find out whether the property has a platform specific value.

In other words: if the current platform is linux-x86-2.6.18-fedora_core_6 and the client is requesting the value of the =installation.location= property, the engine will first look for the following properties (in the specified order) and return the value of the first one that exists:

• installation.location.linux-x86-2.6.18-fedora_core_6
• installation.location.linux-x86-2.6.18
• installation.location.linux-x86
• installation.location.linux
• installation.location

There are various use cases for this feature, the most notable certainly being the installation location for a product. Very often it needs to be platform-specific. E.g. for NetBeans IDE, on all platforms except Mac OS X, it is $N{install}/netbeans-6.0, bu for Mac OS X it needs to be $N{install}/NetBeans 6.0.app.