Categories in 1st Gen Service Shells

This article explains how to associate service categories to a service Shell. CloudShell exposes services to CloudShell users via service categories, which are associated to the CloudShell domains in which the services are required. The service categories of a specific domain constitute that domain’s services catalog. By default, each service Shell template is associated to a category in the Global domain.

There are two ways to associate service Shells to categories:

  • Add the desired categories to the service’s family in Resource Manager Client
  • Define the association in the service Shell’s data model

In this article, we’ll learn how to associate categories via the Shell’s data model.

To associate a category to a service Shell:

1) Make sure you are running Shellfoundry with the Global admin user. Run shellfoundry config to see which user you are using.

2) Create a new Shell from a template using shellfoundry new.

3) Open the Shell’s root folder.

4) Edit the categories in the datamodel.xml and category.xml files.

     To edit the datamodel.xml:

     a) In the /datamodel folder, edit the datamodel.xml.

     b) Under <Categories>, create a duplicate of the commented <Category> line.

     c) Change the category name as appropriate.

     d) Uncomment the line.

     e) Repeat to add additional categories.

     f) Save the file.

     To edit the categories.xml (required if the categories do not exist in CloudShell):

     a) In the /categories folder, edit the categories.xml.

     b) Under <Categories>, create a copy of the lines that start with the <!--<Category Name line and end with </Category>-->.

          For example:

<!--<Category Name="" Catalog="Service">
    <ChildCategories />
  </Category>-->

     c) Specify the category name. Optionally specify child categories, which are nested under parent categories.

     d) Save the file.