Best Practices for Extending the User Interface Layer

When developing extensions for the user interface layer of the vSphere Client, follow these best practices.

• Create pointer node extensions on the Object Navigator home page only for major applications and solutions. This approach provides consistent and meaningful user experience for the customized vSphere Client.
• When you create action set extensions for a particular type of vSphere object, you must use the extensions filtering mechanism. The defined action sets must be visible only when the user selects the relevant vSphere object type.
• Use the REST API for retrieving data from the service layer. Use proxies only for adding, editing, and deleting issued data requests.
• For better performance, avoid making proxy calls that require more than several seconds to return a response. A best practice is to design your extensions to submit a task that returns immediately, and to track the task progress.
• If you use proxies for data requests, verify that you receive the request response before sending another request through the proxy.
• If you use localization data for your plug-in package, follow these recommendations:

  • Set the locale attribute in the <resource> element of the plugin.xml manifest file to the value {locale}. Using the {locale} value instructs the vSphere Client to display the plug-in by using the current vSphere Client locale.

    The following XML fragment shows how the <resource> element can be used in the plug-in module manifest file.

    <plugin id="com.vmware.samples.htmlsample"
       defaultBundle="com_vmware_samples_htmlsample">
    
       <resources baseUrl="locales/">
          <resource>com_vmware_samples_htmlsample</resource>
       </resources>
    
    ....
    
    </plugin>

  • To avoid collisions with other localized plug-in packages, set a unique resource bundle name to the defaultBundle attribute of the <plugin> element in the plug-in manifest file. Use your company name and product name as part of the resource bundle name to make it unique.
  • Make sure that the filenames of your resource files end with _en_US instead of -en_US