portlet

In this article you've seen how a portlet service can be used to encapsulate the integration of your portal with a remote Web application.

When you place your portlet on a page, it makes more sense if it closely matches the name of your SWT view.

The Portlet Filter returns the processed contents as if it were a proper portlet returning contents normally.

WebSphere Studio enables you to easily drag the Web service onto a portlet page in the form of a JSF Web service client component.

This aggregation tag library enables you to render the portlet content within a window frame or to aggregate multiple portlets onto a page.

A generous helping of Ajax makes it easy to arrange or rearrange the portlets onto the page as you think is best.

As the owner or editor of a space, you can drag any of the portlets shown in the menu on the left, and drop them into a spot in the columns.

Each state determines how much real estate a portlet will have on the screen and, therefore, affects how much content can be displayed.

WebSphere Portal supports this paradigm by replacing the screens, which had been used in previous releases, with normal pages and portlets.

The marketing hype tells us that building portlets are easy, with simple portlets being built in a few hours to a few days.

Also on this page, you specify the name and location of a variable that will contain the data being sent from the source portlet.

The cache key for the fragments needs to be computed such that the complete navigational state of the portlet contributes to this key.

A common issue encountered while trying to configure a List portlet is the inability to create user groups within WebSphere Portal.

The event phase of the portlet life cycle does not allow any sort of user interaction.

You can see that this is a lot to think about, especially when you multiply this effort by the number of portlets in your project.

As a result of the invocation of any link, the portlet may define a set of current render parameters.

Another application requirement may be such that the source portlet has no knowledge of the view being displayed on the target portlet.

You can drag-and-move the portlets around the space as well, adjusting their relative position on this dynamic Web page.

In previous releases, you could only enable portlets on the same portal page to communicate, or cooperate, with one another.

The server information portlet is now updated every two seconds with a server memory utilization graph, as shown in Figure 2.

However, when we minimize portlets on a page, the dynamic attribute does not seem to be available.

Figure 3 and figure 4 show how the wizard was used to add such a reference to the web. xml file for the sample portlet applications.

The lack of metadata means that the portlet has nothing that it can use to determine if a certain user is allowed to see an article.

The company wants to add to most of its pages a HotDeals portlet, which lists current special offers by the company and its partners.

This includes markup conversions, annotations, stylesheet applications, and any other conversion that affects an individual portlet.

You can now also easily manage which context process should be applied to which rendering portlet via the configuration panel (Figure 11).

Now you need to decide whether you want the presentation of this portlet to be in an open or minimized state.

The description also shows which output of the source portlet connects to which input of the target portlet, in parentheses.

Because all the code for accessing the remote Web application was placed in a portlet service, only the portlet service needs to be updated.

This page enables you to create and manage pages, install and manage portlets, and perform a few other portal administration tasks.

Since the screen can only be extended in one direction, you can only arrange the portlets in a vertical list.

To provide these configurable assets, the server component needs to be loosely coupled to the content of these portlets.

You can assemble builders into a model, in the same manner that you assemble portlets to become a composite application.

These portlets retrieve the input message of a staff activity, display it to the user, obtain user input, and write it to the system.

The source portlet is now ready to share data.

This would cause a page refresh, and only subsequently was the portlet shown in the maximized or minimized state.

Therefore, the portlets will be rendered as if they where placed in a one-dimensional column.

All three portlets use the same codebase; the only difference is the name of the JSP that each uses.

The portlet must not modify session state or backend state as a result of the invocation of a render link.

This article only attempts to put UML into a proper context for designing portlets.

Add an entry into the contacts list table to make it easier to test the portlet as you develop it.

The portlet adds the statistics section at the bottom of the view as shown in Figure 2.

From here, it is possible for you to write any portlet.

If it does, you can rest assured that this portlet is compliant with JSR 168.

If portlets on a page can be rendered independently of a backend system, they only need CPU resources local to the portal server machine.

Combined the best of the Scorecard and KPI views into a single portlet.

Because of this, and the framework that WebSphere Portal provides, it is pretty easy to derive a component layout for the final portlet.

The base install does not however include the Manage Mobile Pages portlet, which allows you to create the navigation hierarchy.

The cornerstone of your file upload portlet is the Apache Commons FileUpload package (also referred to as FileUpload in this article).

We did not use XML access or the Admin interface for redeploying because we were not changing anything in the portlet. xml file.

They do not usually require explicit coding but only a declaration in the portlet. xml deployment descriptor.

The import will also bring in a portlet. xml file that is not needed until we attempt to run this application as a portlet.

With our portlet built, we are ready to test it inside the WebSphere Portlet test environment.

The download includes a portlet project which fires off the back-end call, and a servlet project which collects the data from the cache.

The Java Portlet Specification only guarantees that this value stays constant for one request.

The longer text fields can be mapped to an RTF Fields (rich text format) portlet in the next column of the mapping.

We were, however, able to accomplish our performance goals without needing to rely on parallel portlet rendering.

Dynamic UIs are well suited for applications in which users might need to have several instances of a page or portlet open for multitasking.

During the action phase of a portlet, render parameters can be set for the portlet's subsequent render phase.

You can add Lists to any portal page just like any other portlet.

This brings up a dialog box, where you can pick the server to which you want to deploy the portlet.

Workplace Services Express contains predefined portlets that allow you to access your existing mail, calendar, and address book information.

A colleague of mine once said, "We want portlet development to become more like an assembly line and less like works of art. "

Unlike normal render requests, the default caching definitions in portlet. xml deployment descriptor do not apply to resource requests.

You are now ready to try out the counter portlet example in the GridSphere portal.

These portlets integrate with the collaboration infrastructure that the company established to improve efficiency for their employees.

By now, you have finished creating all of the WebSphere Personalization artifacts and are ready to export your portlet.

During the lifetime of a portlet, the container sends service requests in different threads to a single portlet instance.

It lets you render a single portlet on the page; it is very easy to use and is best suited for development.

The portlet application descriptor, portlet. xml, provides a few portlet-specific details, as shown in Listing 15.

This article also prepares you for a future tutorial, in which we will detail the creation of an Ajax portlet application.

However, a portlet can only be developed as a WAR file; you cannot deploy a portlet and an EJB in single file.

After the visual modelling occurs, our Portlet Sourcing methodology moves into a second excercise.

These methods are used by the portlet that provides the front end to the business component.

Most projects know that they want to have portlet A, and that this portlet will display information from a specific source.

Such portlets can be optimized in their local code execution path only and should not put too much burden on a running portal system.

However, be aware that processing render links must not change the server side state of a portlet.

Can Web Clipping or the Web Page portlet be used to include an existing site that you won't be able to migrated for awhile?

However, if you refer back to Listing 3, you can see in the section that this portlet supports only the view mode.

Also, if the data does not need to be transferred over the network, the portlet can potentially be rendered more quickly.

Also, be sure to configure the link depth for your portlets on the Configure tab to an appropriate depth.

A good understanding of typical user interactions with the portlet application is needed for a proper design of this nature.

The name of the source portlet, which sends the message, is confusing; therefore, you change it in this section.

Use the API to create portlets or servlets that can parse and interact with forms, or to create extensions for Workplace Forms Viewer.

A pre-defined, default filter converts the portlet fragment output of the portlet into a valid document.

The model-view-controller (MVC) design pattern is frequently used in portlet coding, as it is in Java servlet coding.

However, the portlet container is not standalone; it lives on top of a servlet container and relies on its services.

When a user selects a link in one of the portlets, the user will be directed to another page where another portlet resides.

To exit the screen, click the name of the portlet link in the upper left, so you can return to the current security mappings.

After you select a specific target, the property broker delivers the data to the target in the form of the corresponding portlet action.

Increase usability by keeping the number of pages in a portal, and number of portlets on a page, to a minimum.

The portlet has more logic associated with it and a proper database schema needs to be constructed.

Remember to stop and restart the INS servers before testing the new trigger handler with your subscription portlet.

You could also integrate a custom theme extension that would display a common Please Wait message for any Ajax-enabled portlet on the page.

Dynamic UI application programming interfaces enable you to add transient pages and portlets to the portal user interface.

The portlet project, as shown in the Project Explorer view, contains an icon representing the portlet deployment descriptor.

Portlets are visual windows that organize content from different sources into a single interface for individual or group access.

The name of this preference is com. ibm. portal. bc. ref, and it is specified in the portlet. xml file, as shown in listing 9.

It might seem confusing to swap the terms portlet and servlet, but a portlet is actually an extension of a servlet.

Increase usability by keeping to a minimum the number of pages in a portal and number of portlets on a page.

For requests where no matching response is available, the individual portlet is called to generate a response.

Use the arrows at the bottom of the portlet to navigate through the paging table.

The News area of our portal site contains pages with portlets that provide static content delivered by a content management system.

You should examine the log from the bottom up or search on the name of the portlet.

In the portal architecture, a portlet (typically developed using one of the above-mentioned UI frameworks) is the basic building block.

You set a portlet parameter called cm. workspace to the name of your new workspace.

To add a portlet to any Team Space or other Portal page, click the Palette tab.

The xml file for updating the portlet should be included with the portlet and can be saves as part of the version control.

This solution does not require a portlet session, so you can use it for a public portal with anonymous users.

This convenience allows you to focus on writing the actual portlet code without having to worry about all of the infrastructure.

The steps for creating new pages and adding portlets for a KIOSK portal application are the same as those for normal computer browsers.

Again imagine that the portlet doing the listing should only a show some articles if the user is member of the gold customer group.

One or more cooperative portlets on a portal page can automatically react to changes from a source portlet triggered by an action or event.

Dropdowns are commonly used in the presentation, whether it is portlet or just a JSF Web page.

The requirement to retrieve information about available portlets in the system is mainly motivated by a portal framework.

Depending on the defined rules, the portlet presents the content customized by his or her user profile.

This action adds the section shown in Listing 8 to the portlet application definition of the portlet deployment descriptor.

Therefore, you can place the relevant portlets on a portal page as needed, providing a seamless search experience for your users and data.

Instead, you could create a hash map of zip code and weather information, and save that information into the portlet service.

The portlet property portletListNeedAccess lists the unique names of all those portlets to which the action set should be applied.

The IBM Portlet API defines action handling to be processed separately via ActionListener interface and its implementing classes.

The Theme Builder portlet makes this process easier by allowing you to quickly start customizing your portal's appearance.

The jar: install task puts the jars into the local repository to be available for the build of the portlets.

At this point, you should test your subscription portlet and try to create and save a subscription.

The context-exchange portlet can be displayed on-demand as an additional dynamic portlet and closed when not needed anymore.

The calling portlet's URI is then converted to a String value and is set as an attribute value to the PortletRequest object.

This article has shown you a complete portlet application that connects to a business process with a human task.

The last step is to modify the Attributes portlet to add the additional fields used by the ClearQuest Integration.

Each portlet is mapped to a Servlet defined in the web deployment descriptor by way of the href attribute on the portlet element.

Or perhaps it should be provided on the home page in the form of a stock portlet.

The specification requires that you prefix the key by a unique ID for a specific portlet window.

The first is called shared render parameters and allows portlets to set params that can be read by other portlets.

This simply requires adding the content adapter Java class to the portlet code, then creating an instance of it when the claim is submitted.

Parallel portlet rendering attempts to execute the code for each portlet in parallel to speed up the rendering of the portal page.

Like with WML, the screen can only extend in one direction, so you can only arrange the portlets in a vertical list.

For rendering content that exists on a remote Workplace Web Content Management node, the Remote Rendering portlet must be configured.

A large banner would cover the visible area; therefore, only the company name is provided in the portlet title.

The Certificate Requests awaiting fulfillment panel in the CA portlet enables you to fulfill a CSR by issuing a certificate.

When you bundle a servlet with your portal application, you can share session data between the servlet and portlet.

The content author selects the identifier in TeamSite while creating content and the portlet uses it to fetch the content to be displayed.

Since the offline server must crawl portlet links to perform an offline synchronization, dynamic content can cause problems.

However, where it resides in the list of portlets is entirely up to you.

An iFrame of a complete Web page typically includes the page header and navigation information, which is not desirable in a portlet.

Once the portlet is deployed, you are ready to upload a file.

It is scheduled to be available in the next portlet bridge release sometime early September.

Most major portal applications require more than a simple portlet or two.

You see the message text containing the Customer Number in the receiving portlet, as shown in the following figure.

After you deploy the WAR file you can run the portlets to see the results.

Each of these pages contains a navigation area that lets users navigate within the portal.

This attribute takes a unique identifier (name of the content node) to specify the page where the portlet can be found.

However, the Expert mode option enables full control over these processes, and is embedded into all the portlets previously mentioned.

While processing the action and the render phase of a portlet, entries can be put into and retrieved from a cache.

If the rule is a visibility rule on a portlet, the code calling the rule is the portal server, and is not yours to alter.

One of our portlets is dependent upon the EJB application being deployed.

Users with the appropriate administrative authorization can set the number of pages and portlets displayed on each page of the portlet.

Bob could collect and store all necessary information for feeding to the main form (on the target page) within the context-exchange portlet.

Users can select these scopes from a selection menu provided with the search box in the theme and with the Search Center portlet.

If the request meets these prerequisites, you can embed the portlet content into a window frame.

The first time you navigate to this new portlet, a workspace is created with the name you entered as the value for cm. workspace.

Within the IBM Portlet API, there is no difference between a render request and response and an action request and response.

Select the check box next to the name of your portlet in the Portlet title column, and then click OK (Figure 27).

This wrapper can be customized to never show the skin or show only the portlet menu at all times.

Because of the limited screen size of a KIOSK, we recommend no skin for the portlets to be displayed on KIOSK screens.

To add documents to the folder you created in the previous step, click the Import File button at the top of the Document Manager portlet.

The administration console has had an upgrade; most notably, there are a few new portlets available.

Portlets provide both visual and programmatic means of delivering information to the users.

This enabled the capturing of the external links to Help, Edit, and Maximize, as defined in portlet. xml.

The portlet can retrieve such a service through a standard JDNI lookup.

The previous section showed how data can be shared within the views of a single portlet.

From the portal, assign proper security settings for the portal page(s) and portlets associated with a particular user or group.

Using profiles, you can automatically generate different variations of a portlet from the same model for different users or situations.

Login and selfcare are implemented as portlets and can be customized for a specific virtual portal.

Because only the rendered content pieces are deployed, there is no data that the portlet can use for any kind of personalization.

You can either bundle the servlet with the portlet WAR file or include it as part of a stand-alone Web application.

The next step is to package the portlet as a WAR file and test it in the Apache Jetspeed portal.

In Figure 5, the ClearQuest Integration portlet is now in the layout and no longer shows in the Customize Portlets dialog.

You can now define a specific rule for each portlet that influences the visibility of that portlet.

You can also broadcast the property to all portlets on the page that have declared an action associated with a matching input property.

Previously used to insert portlet navigation links above the main navigation.

The portlet title, portlet menu actions, and a border to mark the portlet area are all rendered by the skin.

You can use normal JSP or HTML handling to get the portlet links and portlet content into a good looking design.

You are now ready to develop the portlet views.

Create a method named testClickingEditButtonAndCheckSetURLWithPortletUnit, whose responsibility is to test the Edit mode of the portlet.

You can either use a standard builder (the Portlet Factory provides more than 70 builders out-of-the-box) or write your own builder.

Check whether or not the portlet needs any connection to another product, such as a database or legacy system, that has failed.

The portlet will display host name, host IP Address, and the application server name for each of the clones, as shown in Figure 33.

Each Cognos Viewer portlet would be configured with a common channel name.

First, in the init method, the name of the HTML and WML view JSPs from the portlet configuration are loaded.

NOTE: You should name your portlet something similar to the name of your Eclipse view for clarity.

Pages with such portlets on it may be a good candidate for being stored and served from caches.

You are now ready to create a portlet project.

The Security Realms portlet enables you to add new security realms and edit existing security realms.

Note: If you want to display both portlets and pages of a portal, configure the IBM Search Sitemap Utility portlet to do so.

You could choose to extend this custom portlet service for other purposes beyond information sharing.

The class name of the resource bundle must be accessible via the classpath and have the title in it with the key "javax. portlet. title. "

Because portlet applications are shared resources, their properties will be common across the entire installation.

The next major task is to create a project for the portlet in Application Developer.

The Journal Content Portlet allows you to easily display a CMS article on a portal layout page.

The development tasks explained in this article for implementing page navigation can be used for both standard portlets and Struts portlets.

A link appears on the sidebar with the name of the portlet application (Change Case).

Using a state chart diagram (see Figure 2) can help to determine the interface (JSP) transitions for the portlet.

When you click an order number, the other portlets show the details of that particular order.

This time the cache should not be fresh anymore, and must, therefore re-render the portlet.

For more info on deploying this demo portlet to any version of JBoss Portal (beta or stable) read here.

The normal servlet filter concept does not provide any portlet support to developers who wish to create a PortletDocumentFilter.

The body will show either one maximized portlet (rendered in the screen region) or the navigation links (rendered in the navigation region).

The last step is to deploy the portlet application to your WebSphere Portal server.

Jetspeed then automatically installs the portlet and it is ready to be used.

Using the Lotus Connections portlet allows you to stay updated with blog entries right in the portal experience.

Portlets provide a powerful means of managed and configurable content delivery.

Many portlets need to call a third-party service such as a Web service or other legacy system.

Additionally, WebSphere Everyplace Access provides a solution for the occasionally-connected portal user through access to offline portlets.

Therefore, you add methods to the portlet service which the portlets set prior to calling any of the business methods.

The portlet needs to be especially prepared to recreate information during the render phase (for example, by accessing a backend).

Remember these key steps for developing a portlet user interface to a human task in a remote business process.

The System Info portlet has a cool new server memory usage graph that updates in real time using Asynchronous JavaScript XML (Ajax).

Next, select the portlet to be displayed in each row and column, as shown in Figure 3.

The items mentioned in this article are the ones that are likely to take more time and effort for your portlets.

You will provide a simple expand-collapse mechanism using JavaScript to render the portlet actions as a part of portlet skin.

The portlet uses a number of state variables to control the flow of execution and determine which UI is rendered.

With portlet caching, the portal aggregates cached portlet fragments into complete pages before responding to a request.

name: The name of the portlet instance that is unique across the page (although not across different pages in the portal).

In addition to a server component, the product includes a portlet as well as an IBM Workplace Managed Client plug-in.

This article does not describe the Java Portlet API or programming model; rather, it focuses on WebSphere Portal specific extensions.

The values contributed by the portlet window always have precedence over the value contributed by the portlet definition.

If the portlet window state is currently in normal or minimized state, check whether the portlet is configured for rendering in normal mode.

Customize a page to have both portlets as shown in the following figure.

The service interface and protocol for a local portlet is defined by the Java Portlet Specification.

This causes the cleanup of all resources associated with the List and puts the portlet back in non-configured mode.

The WebSphere Portal Toolkit provides a wizard that will create a project for any of the common portlet types.

Each portlet is mapped to a servlet defined in the deployment descriptor by the href attribute on the portlet element.

However, this scenario illustrates that administrator privilege is not required for creating themes with the portlet.

Then, you can access the World Clock portlet which produces the Request Metrics logs, as shown in the previous section.

Optionally, you could use this script in a batch file to compile the portlet.

Once your portlet has been deployed into a portal, you should test for the behavior of the portlet under load.

The new rendering portlet no longer requires a session to store its data, but instead uses render parameters that are encoded in the URL.

Hopefully this can be the start of a set of models for portlet designs upon which we can begin to build a set of patterns for reuse.

The credentials are maintained by each user within portlets, which must be synchronized with the user registry.

By writing a portlet service to connect to the Web application you hide the details of this integration from the individual portlets.

The portlet class in both portlets acts as a controller that delegates all servicing work to a facade.

You design and implement your portlets to take into account these actions and messages, which requires that you do some custom development.

This ensures that the appropriate portlet tag libraries are initialized and used in the JSF presentation.

In response to that action, a server-side action can be invoked on the Tracking Details portlet.

As you can see, for anything but trivial portlets, this can become cumbersome.

This option can also be used for both portal (rendering portlets) and non-portal sites.

With core classes and interactions in place, we can take a look at the presentation layer necessary to complete our portlet.

Once approved, a CSR is automatically listed as a request to be fulfilled in the CA portlet.

The action attribute of the element can be either "update" , or "create" to install a portlet application.

However, our base application, not written as a portlet application, gets passed an HttpServletRequest in its execute methods.

After all the servers have been updated, you can deploy the search and browse portlet to point to the search collection.