portlets

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.

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.

The name and value can be any string except in the case of JSR 168 Struts portlets, where the parameter name must be spf_strutsAction.

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.

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.

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

Rational Application Developer Version 7 provides a set of tools to define your source and target portlets and to pass data between them.

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.

You can use any of these portlets, as well as your newly created custom portlets in the same workspace in any page of the portal project.

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

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

Portlets can be rearranged to the unique preferences of a user or community. Move things up, down, and all around.

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

Congratulations, you are now ready to develop the task processing portlets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

All the grid activity happens in the background - from creation of grid credentials to retrieval of these credentials for use by portlets.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Names containing special characters also cause problems in the Collaborative Portlets as well as the Domino extended product family.

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

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

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.

Armed with these standards, portlets have become one of the most exciting areas for presenting portal environment.

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The wiring tool that is available on the portal server can help you wire the relationships between portlets that share events between them.

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

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

Now you should be able to use the Document Management portlets without maintaining the username and password.

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

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

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.

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.

The final example is independent of the others and demonstrates how RRD can be extended to support portlets.

News -- Contains two levels of pages made up of portlets that provide employees with news articles on technologies, products, and customers.

Page-to-page communication between portlets in WebSphere Portal can be implemented using URL parameters or cookies.

The following three code listings demonstrate the call procedure for a localization pack manager in JSPs, servlets, and portlets.

The packaging of offline portlets is almost identical to traditional portlet development, so we won't go into detail on this topic here.

A user logging into portal can only see and work with those for which portlets the user has the necessary access rights.

Unlike in the basic portlet sample, the two portlets do not share a session bean.

Your portal and your WebSphere Portal environment require additional configuration beyond just installing portlets or components.

Now that portlets can communicate across pages, portlets in different Web applications can exchange information, including complex objects.

Like the TConnect. java sample, the Document Management portlets have a utility class that has all the connect and disconnect functions.

Portlets in composite applications often require interaction with the human task manager in the WebSphere Process Server.

They cause no performance overhead as the number of portlets sharing information grows.

Complete pages, however, typically consist of the aggregation of many portlets.

Portlets are similar to servlets, but they focus on the presentation layer of your application.

Then, independently developed portlets come together on the same page and look like they were developed by a single team.

As you can see, the design of the portlets are highly application-specific.

Navigate and select the checkboxes to add portlets to the portal page, as shown in Figure 31, then select OK.

Above the Presentation layer, you define who can access this information, or who can actually modify the content of the portlets.

Our w3 Home page can have up to ten portlets, resulting in up to ten session contexts per page.

As for cache expiration, there is a special mechanism for the contributed value of cache scope for portlets as well.

Workplace Services Express introduces the Palette, a slide-out panel from which you can select portlets to add to a page.

The visitor would also find the WebSphere Portal Catalog and can search the catalog for portlets to integrate with his backend systems.

Page-to-page communication is suitable for portlets that are on many pages and do not have much user input data.

To manage portlets, a portal framework needs to know which portlets are available in the system.

The page matrix is a work product or artifact you create to document all the pages and portlets that the portal will use.

At run time, the portal administrator (or business users) can wire together the different portlets.

Besides portlet events, public render parameters represent an alternative way for coordination between portlets.

The news articles displayed by these portlets are provided by a content management system.

Configure the pages and portlets that will be used for human task processing.

You can use URL parameters communication which does not carry user input data and cookies if the portlets need to transfer user input data.

The sample request XML file can be extended to install multiple portlets and create multiple page groups.

Select Edit Page Layout for the page on which the portlets are placed.

Portlets need to publish such cache information as a contribution to the overall cache information on the page where the portlet appears.

Therefore, these portlets can also run in environments that do not support the IBM extension.

Readers should have a basic understanding of developing and installing portlets, and of customizing pages.

In both parts, we used the portlet test environment within the Portal Toolkit to test our portlets individually.

Rather, Pluto is a lightweight portlet container suitable either for embedding inside a full-blown portal server or testing portlets.

container microformat: Defines portlet containers as placeholders for portlets.

The explicit wiring model allows administrators to fully control how portlets deployed in WebSphere Portal can communicate.

Although both mechanisms allow exchanging information between portlets, they differ in several aspects.

You can use shared libraries to share resources among different components or portlets within the portal.

Question: I recently installed WebSphere Portal 5. 1 and I'm planning, together with my customer, to develop some portlets.

The portal determines the portlets on this page, and checks the user's access rights to these portlets.

The ID is passed as an additional parameter to the addPage method, and then delivered to the portlets on the newly generated page instance.

Keep in mind that caching is not desired for certain portlets, especially when using personalization.

The first step is to create a new single sign-on portlet step by step, rather than modifying the Document Management portlets directly.

The Web Content folder contains two JSP files -- one view for each of your portlets.

It gathers information about all deployed portlets to provide a list of them on top of the portal aggregation.

Of course, these definitions include the SPA navigation portlets, which are treated like utility portlets in static pages.

Receive data from other portlets, and then update its own view accordingly (target portlet).

Now, you can use static page aggregation (SPA) to exploit the power of portlets by aggregating them with the static web pages.

If desired, you can install WebSphere Portal on WebSphere Application Server Advanced Single Server Edition to debug the portlets.

Next, you walk through the steps that portlet developers take to create the process initiation and task processing portlets.

Also a horizontal rule and navigation title are included if normal mode portlets have been rendered.

The explicit user name and password strings are values of the parameters wps. portlets. userid and password.

For portlets that were developed independently, complex event payload classes are rarely compatible.

Bob often uses additional portlets (operation-supporting elements) to fill out the primary form.

The Palette initially contains default portlets, but an administrator can add other portlets as desired to the palette.

It consists of tools to create portlets or Web applications that are accessible from various target mobile devices.

Your business logic for application portlets should be in or behind a layer of session beans.

Before adding the portlets, the administrator must configure the connection to the back-end mail server as mentioned.

You can easily add a new adapter to the system to work with Common PIM portlets.

The imported projects contain multiple portlets that share JSF JSPs and use property broker for portlet communication.

HR - Used to insert a horizontal rule if there are normal mode portlets displayed above the navigation.

Portlets should meet all of the requirements of the Web Application checklist at the accessibility Web site.

When the URL of the Web site of this KIOSK application is accessed, anonymous users see the Hello World page and the portlets on it.

When you try to share portlets across virtual portals, an important impact of scoping and sharing surfaces.

The portlets displayed on the page is reduced to a list of links with the portlet title.

Click and hold the left mouse button over the Attributes title bar in the Customize Portlets dialog.

Only portlets configured for maximized mode have their icon navigation rendered to maximize the portlet content.

Performing unit tests on your portlets before they're exposed publicly is a must.

Only portlets configured for maximized mode have their navigation rendered to maximize the portlet content.

The w3 state would then only maintain minimized portlets during the course of a single session.

It assembles a message containing the customer number and sends it to the other two portlets on the page.

They allow fine-grained control by setting up different sorts of wires between portlets (on-page or cross-page, public or private).

The service metrics and alerts are also made available as portlets that can be easily integrated into enterprise portals.

As already shown, tags at specified locations in the static layout file might refer to portlets, containers, or navigation.

Most likely, your portlets will not meet all of the accessibility standards unless you do some extra work.

Portlets extend Servlets now, so the web deployment descriptor is needed to declare the Servlet (portlet) class.

Use session beans acting as remote facades to wrap complex interactions and to reduce remote calls between portlets and domain objects.

WSRP is the standard for remote rendering of portlets, enabling a portal to aggregate content from multiple sources.

In the example, we added Anonymous Users to the User role for the relevant portlets and page, as describe below.

Portlets may output HTML as well as other types of pages for different client devices.

Listed below are descriptions of the portlets and their corresponding views.

Markup fragments within portlets are generated from data maintained by the portlet.

The desktop client provides a portlet container to run portlets that support the JSR 168 specification.

In many cases, caching is disabled, or the portlets themselves are not configured to take advantage of caching.

Scroll down the right column of the Portlets page to show the Initialization list.

You see there are two portlets in the war file: HotDeals portlet and Transaction portlet.

Faces portlets typically pass the action name and value into the action request using a parameter in the JSP.

The portal server assembles all the mark-up fragments when all portlets finish processing.

Context-exchange portlets can support multiple independent sets of accumulated data.

Most portlets will require this model to be extended based on the business logic implemented.

Portlets are the basic building blocks of portlet applications.

Using the palette simplifies the task of arranging portlets on a page, and makes the design experience much more intuitive.

Thus, portlets written using this guideline will not display correctly.

The New Portlet wizard: This wizard helps you develop and unit-test portlets written to the IBM standard portlet API.

If permitted, end users can customize their own pages by selecting and placing portlets, and by changing portlet settings.

You can configure Lists portlets to be interactive if needed.

The sample portlets and configuration help you develop a complete process portal application.

The portal server coordinates the execution and markup aggregation of multiple portlets.

Transcoding Technology lets you apply stylesheets to portlets that generate XML content.

You can even design a portlet that uses multiple "sub-portlets" (useful for displaying multiple panes to the user).

Session: Data can be shared across portlets using the application scope session attribute.

After all portlets are processed the complete page is returned to the client.

It uses Dojo for some of the administrative console portlets.

By treating this global key as a public render parameter in all portlets, they will coordinate automatically.

Access pages and portlets -- If you click on a portlet link, you view the page containing that portlet.

WebSphere Portal provides a class called CredentialVaultService which portlets can use to store and retrieve credentials from the vault.

Can test portlets with Content Management, embedded messaging, etc. . .

This programming interface will be explained in detail in the article about dynamic and context sensitive portlets.

Using the C2A delivery method, you can transfer data from a source portlet to one or more target portlets with a simple click.

These values must match for a property transfer between two portlets.

As mentioned earlier, there is a special mechanism for portlets for the contributed value of the cache expiration.

It also offered guidance on modifying the Document Management portlets to use the LTPA token approach.

This service presents and manages information about the Web console portlets and portlet applications.

The portal page consists of different markup fragments that are produced by portlets.

The dynamic portlets will receive this dynamic UI context through property broker events when the dynamic page is launched.

If you're developing complex portlets, though, you may want to test smaller pieces of your code.

Next, select a template page that already has the theme, theme policy, and portlets defined on it that you want to use (Figure 4).

In the concrete portlet definition, or Add a parameter via the manage portlets administration portlet using the Modify Parameters option.

The MyWork area of the portal site contains portlets used by employees for collaborating in their day-to-day business.

However, the risk is lower than for portal frameworks that normally include several portlets per page.

It requires a learning curve; once you master this approach, you can quickly develop and test complex portlets.

The sample portlets perform each of those activities.

I'm going to take you through creating the simplest of portlets for WebSphere Portal.

How do you intend to deal with application access? You want to ensure that different companies do not see each other's portlets.

Two portlets can be wired together to share data only if they define the same Data Type URL.

Portlets should use a cache rather than the session to keep cached data to enhance performance while saving system resources.

Cookies therefore provide an alternative mechanism for coordination between portlets that can be useful in some circumstances.

From the portlet programming point of view, portlets can configure caching as specified by the Portlet Specification (PLT. 18. 1).

Change locales -- This displays the pages and portlets in the corresponding language.

Bob uses operation-supporting elements (additional portlets) to fill out forms.

Therefore, for Pocket PC devices, always display portlets in a single column.

Portal URLs are full of unique identifiers that represent specific pages and portlets.

All the portlets described below use passive credentials.

The individual markup fragments produced by portlets, however, are also potentially cacheable.

We will use the IBM Portal Toolkit for portlet development and use HATS business logic to create messaging between portlets on a Web page.

For portlets, there is a special mechanism that applies to the contributed value of the cache expiration and cache scope.

Figure 3 illustrates a sample spreadsheet that you can use to begin this initial process of outlining pages and portlets.

Therefore, the cache key for portlets running in WebSphere Application Server is configurable in detail using cachespec. xml.

Java developers have a freely available tool for testing that they've written their portlets in accordance with the Portlet Specification.

Figure 1 is a screen capture of the portlet wiring tool with the two sample portlets wired together.

This article articulates one approach for designing portals and portlets using the Unified Modeling Language (UML).

Is there any solution for dynamic portlet titles that also supports minimized portlets?

MyWork -- Contains pages made up of portlets used by employees during the work day to collaborate with their colleagues.

Repeat these installation steps for the remaining two portlets.

It is an aggregation point for services delivered through portlets.

Only standard portlets following the JSR 168 specification are supported for publishing this information.

In the JUnit tests, you need to configure the mock portlet container to run the portlets.

These portlets are very simple to configure; however, they are not a panacea.

The configure mode of portlets also provides configurability.

In addition to content, portal resources include tabs, navigation menus, pages, portlets, portlet skins, portal themes.

Supporting portlets help the user gather information required to complete a task.

You can create JSF-based portlets using a wizard, and you can use additional JSF UI widgets that portlets might use.

This mechanism ensures that users have proper authorizations on pages and portlets before search results are presented to them.

Developing cooperative JSR 168-compliant portlets involves designing and editing XML schema (XSD) and WSDL files.

Since there are two portlets, be sure to select the option for a content page with two sections.

During action processing, the portal engine and portlets can modify the state.

Then you create themes for the static layouts and skins for the portlets in the static pages.

The simple fact that they both use the same global name is enough; just place the two portlets on a page, and they will start interacting.

It can be a cooperative target, meaning that it can receive data from other portlets.

For portlets whose content is shared among users, caching can signficantly improve overall performance.

Then configure the search portlets to communicate with the load balancer.

The page context is transmitted to the portlets on the newly generated page instance.

Users can use RSS readers or create a link on their Web sites to access the feed or configure RSS feed portlets.

Any orphaned portlets are adopted by this hidden container.

HelloWorldPortlet should be displayed below the two test portlets.

If you do not want users to change the layout of the portlets, de-select the Maximized and Minimized boxes.

A portlet can be a cooperative source, meaning that it can send data to other portlets.

Ideally, you should integrate these Web applications by porting the presentation layer to custom developed portlets.

Within RSA is a good amount of information on developing application types such as portals, EJB applications, and portlets, to name a few.

Basic portlets also pass the action name and value into the action request from the JSP.

At the time of creation of sample application the ajax4jsf didn't support Portlets.

Your portlets can access the models shown in Table 1.