Widgets provide a nice mechanism for deploying Eclipse features and plugins to Lotus Notes 8 Standard clients. These widgets can be created using a wizard provided in Notes 8.5.1 (below) or manually.
Widgets are XML documents that describe dynamic contributions/extensions to the Notes 8 client. Part of the widget XML is an imageUrl attribute for an optional image for the widget. As the number of installed widgets grows, images can be useful to distinguish among them.
While it may make sense for web widgets to get their icon from the web site, like /favicon.ico, provisioning widgets (widgets that install plugins) may want to use an image inside the plugin itself.
If no image is specified, a default image is used:
So what do we put in imageUrl that will reference an image inside a plugin? The Eclipse platform supports a special “platform:” URI which enables us to provide a URL to a resource inside a plugin. The URL for image “/icons/sample.gif” in plugin “foo.myplugin” is:
Below is a provisioning widget’s XML (extension.xml) which installs 2 Eclipse features and specifies a custom image for the widget.
Here is how the provisioning widget looks in “My Widgets":