CCF Client Components
CCF client components include the integrated UI that an agent uses, the client-side components that provide the UI integration functionality, and services and tools for developers. The developer tools are the Application Integration Framework (AIF), the Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT), the Multi-Channel Engine (MCE), and the client-side components of DCS. The developer tools are the focus of this guide.
Application Integration Framework
The Application Integration Framework (AIF) is a software framework that facilitates information sharing, interaction, and communication between applications and processes running on the client. In CCF, AIF is used by the Integrated Desktop. For more information, see Application Integration Framework (AIF) Overview.
Integrated Desktop
The Integrated Desktop (ID) is a Windows Smart Client that runs on the agent’s workstation. It is the control interface that presents CCF operations to the agent. The agent uses the ID to interact with workflows and to gain access to hosted and non-hosted applications. To the agent, the ID appears to be a desktop (client) only, although it has both client and server components. The ID is built on the Application Integration Framework (AIF), and provides session management and single sign-on capabilities. The source code supplied with CCF is a reference implementation that you can use to develop a user interface that meets your specific business requirements.
Hosted Application Toolkit
The Hosted Application Toolkit (HAT) is a set of components that can significantly reduce the effort required to integrate applications in CCF. The HAT provides an application inspector tool, a set of data-driven adapters (DDAs), and a visual design tool for creating the business logic and workflows (called automations) between hosted applications.
HAT has two client components:
- HAT Core Engine, which uses Windows Workflow Foundation (WF) to drive automations.
- Data-driven adapters (DDAs), which use XML documents to provide generic access to user interfaces. CCF2009 provides DDAs for Windows-based applications, Web applications, and Java-based applications.
For more information about HAT, see HAT Software Factory and HAT Quick Starts.
Multi-Channel Engine
The Multi-channel Engine (MCE) allows UI processes to share common logic and metadata on different delivery channels. The MCE provides two major functions:
It separates channel-independent and channel-dependent development. The channel independent components include the UI logic, the navigational control logic, the logical information (data views), and event handling. The channel-dependent UI provides the actual navigational controls and visual representation of the information.
The MCE front-end improves the consistency of the navigational logic among delivery channels. Standardization and reuse of the navigational logic allows channel UI developers to focus on the physical layout and specific navigation of the channel.
It persist UI process states and move them between channels. If data acquisition is interrupted, the user will not need to restart the process. It also allows sessions to be resumed between different delivery channels.
For more information about MCE, see The MultiChannel Engine and Advanced MCE Development.
DCS Service Agent
The DCS Service Agent Application Block is a client component that uses the DCS discovery service to identify the target service endpoints, and then performs metadata exchange to determine service policies. It dynamically builds the send pipeline as requested by service policies, including standard DCS policies, such as encoding, security, client caching, logging and context transportation.