Have you read through the Windchill Customization Guide, specifically the chapter "Getting Started with Windchill Customization?" It's definitely a good place to start. https://support.ptc.com/view?im_dbkey=161141 <- Customization guide for 10.2 M020 but you should consider getting the guide for your version of Windchill.
The general steps I use are as follows:
- Install Eclipse
- Install appropriate JDK
- You'll want to compile Java files with the same Java version that your production Windchill uses.
- Associate your project to Windchill class files and.Jar files.
- For this part I use an OOTB Windchill to get access to Jars and class files for development. (All our customizations are linked from an SVN repository in Eclipse)
- For projects I use the codebase as an external class folder
- For projects I associate to Jar files
- You can either create a user library with the Jar files or directly associate them to each project you work on.
- Currently the only Jars i have needed are: \codebase\*.jar \codebase\lib\*.jar, \codebase\WEB-INF\lib\*.jar, \srclib\servlet.jar, \srclib\ie\infoEngine.jar and \srclib\tool\*.jar.
- Write some code, compile, paste into codebase appropriately, restart Windchill/Tomcat service and you are good to go.
I know my explanation isn't extremely detailed but hopefully it's enough to get you going. This also doesn't mention all the does and dont's of your request to "modify the java code." At one of the TC meetings I believe we talked about producing a best practices guide for this exact thing. Maybe this will re-spark the interest.
