In many cases, it may be desirable to create an OVF envelope starting from
scratch. As mentioned earlier, one of the eclipse artifacts that is present
within the composition tool is a new editor that provides just this capability.
In essence, what you would do is create a new file within your eclipse
workspace, as you would any file within an eclipse IDE. What is new is the type
of file, namely an Envelope Model.
The steps to create a new OVF envelope are:
- Create a new project (or use an existing project) to hold the OVF
envelope files if one does not already exist

- Create a new Envelope Model file within the project using the
File/New/Other menu action

- At this point you will have a skeleton OVF envelope opened within the
new editor. Bear in mind that the majority of the OVF metadata is to be
added in following the new file creation.

- Add additional content into the OVF envelope by highlighting an element
within the editor, right click and selecting either "New Child"
or "New Sibling", depending on the content to be added.

- All of the typical editing commands will perform as expected, including
cut, copy, paste. In addition, a view you will want to have open is the
Properties view. Open the Properties view through
either the context menu for an OVF object, or the Window/Show
View/Properties menu action. The Properties view provides you
with the attribute names and their corresponding values for the selected
element within the tree editor. This view is the place where you can change
data values for the selected attribute. In the example below, a new "File"
element was added under the "References" section and when
selected, its corresponding attributes are visible and changeable within the
properties view.

- That’s pretty much it for creating a new OVF envelope. When you save the
file you are editing, the envelope is serialized into standard OVF format,
and if desired, can be opened up with either the OVF Envelope editor, or any
other editor capable of viewing XML files if you wish to inspect the XML
representation of the envelope.

- The envelope in the Envelope editor

- The envelope in a standard text editor displaying the serialized XML.
