Wires concepts

Blocks appear in the Wires design canvas as icons that represent either the sources of information or the actions that you want to use to change this information into the result for your mashup. You connect blocks to define how information is changed to become the final result for the mashup. See also What is a mashup?.

MashZone NextGen has a set of built-in actions that allow you to combine, filter or select, add or transform information for the mashup. Actions also allow you to define input fields for the mashup for dynamic results. You change the input when you use the mashup to receive different result.

MashZone NextGen administrators or developers can also define custom actions and add them to Wires. Developers should see Adding Custom Blocks to MashZone NextGen Wires Using Macros for more information.

You can define one or several conditions that must be met before any block is used in the mashup. These are called execute conditions that you define as properties of the block.

When I try to draw connections between blocks they just disappear. How do I connect blocks in Wires?

You must draw connections between ports of two blocks. Ports are the small hubs or buttons on the sides of blocks. Each block has an input port on the left side of the block, to receive data, and an output port on the right side of the block to send data to another block.

The most common reason why preview will not work is that one of the mashables or mashups in your mashup is inactive. Inactive mashables and mashups have an inactive flag

in the Block Menus and the block shows an inactive flag in the Design Canvas. The service or mashup must be activated before you can preview results for the block or for your mashup.

I get the wrong results when I use the Sort action with dates. Why doesn't this work?

The most common reason for sorting problems for fields that contain dates is that the dates use a format that MashZone NextGen does not support. MashZone NextGen supports U.S. date formats including:

MM/DD/YY or variations, such as MM-DD-YYYY or MM.DD.YY. For example, 01/05/07 for January 5, 2007.

Month names (either as three-character abbreviations or completely spelled out) DD, YYYY. For example: Jan 12, 2005 or August 9, 1899.

Day of the week, Month DD, YYYY [AD|BC]. For example, Tuesday, April 8, 2008 AD.

Wires only allows you to work with mashups that you create - you cannot edit mashups that other users have created. They are available in the Block Menus so that you can use them in your own mashups.

Wires also will not open advanced mashups, created by MashZone NextGen developers, because these mashups use features that Wires does not support.

What do all the strange block properties, such as <appid>, mean for a mashable?

This is a wildcard that allows any namespaces that may be used in results. See What is a namespace? for more information.

A namespace is a unique identifier for a set of XML elements. Namespaces are used in the results for some mashables to allow elements from different organizations to work together without having duplicate names - even if two groups use the same element name, the namespace uniquely identifies each one.

Wires handles namespaces for you so that you do not need to see them or know what they are. They appear in element names as prefix:element-name. The prefix is actually an alias for a URI (unique resource identifier), such as the URL for a web site.