Beginning a new work area

 

Before you begin

Be sure that your client has a reference to the UserWorkArea interface, as described in the topic Accessing the work area service or a reference to a user defined partition as defined in Accessing a user defined work area partition. The following steps use the UserWorkArea partition as an illustration. However a user defined partition can be used in the exact same way.

 

Overview

Use the begin method to create a new work area and associate it with the calling thread. A work area is scoped to the thread that began the work area and is not accessible by multiple threads. The begin method takes a string as an argument; the string is used to name the work area. The argument must not be null, which causes the java.lang.NullPointer exception to be raised. In the following code example, the application begins a new work area with the name SimpleSampleServlet:

public class SimpleSampleServlet {
...
   try {
      ...
      userWorkArea = (UserWorkArea)jndi.lookup(
         "java:comp/websphere/UserWorkArea");
   }
   ...

   userWorkArea.begin("SimpleSampleServlet");
   ...
}

The begin method is also used to create nested work areas; if a work area is associated with a thread when the begin method is called, the method creates a new work area nested within the existing work area.

The work area service makes no use of the names associated with work areas; You can name work areas in any way that you choose. Names are not required to be unique, but the usefulness of the names for debugging is enhanced if the names are distinct and meaningful within the application. Applications can use the getName method to return the name associated with a work area by the begin method.

 

What to do next

Using a work area

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See Also

Nested work areas

 

Related Tasks

Completing a work area
Retrieving the name of the active work area

 

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