Operations Manager Management Pack Authoring - Exchanging Data Between Dashboard Components

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This document is part of the Operations Manager Management Pack Authoring Guide.  The Microsoft System Center team has validated this procedure as of Revision #4.  We will continue to review any changes and periodically provide validations on later revisions as they are made.  Please feel free to make any corrections or additions to this procedure that you think would assist other users.

Component Variables

Component Variables allow you to store an object or value that can be accessed by different components in a Component Implementation. Note that a Component Implementation can only contain a single component, but that component may have bindings to multiple other components. Variables allow these components to share data.

One common use for component variables is to store output from one component that can then be bound to the input of another component. Variables are required for this functionality since you cannot bind the output of one component to the input of another.

This concept is illustrated in the following diagram.

The following sample XML shows the syntax for declaring a Variable. You can specify a default value for a variable as you can with a property.

<ComponentImplementation TypeID="ElementID" TypeId="ComponentType">
  <Composite>
    <Variable Id="{VariableId}" Type="{VariableType}"/>
    <Component TypeID="ReferencedElementID">
      <Binding PropertyId="PropertyName">
        <!-- Bindings for the component -->
      </Binding>
    </Component> 
  </Composite>
</ComponentImplementation>

You can also assign a value to a variable when it is declared using any of the value declarations as in the following sample. Alternatively, you can set the value using a $Variable variable with an outgoing property.

The following table provides the attributes of a Variable.

Attribute

Description

ID

Identifier for the Variable. Must be unique within the Component Implementation.

Type

The type of the Variable. Corresponds to one of the Data Types.

See Also