| edgar@info.nl 2004-04-27, 10:33 am |
| Hi,
I would like to know if anyone has come across this requirement and what the preferred way of implementing this functionality is in WPS 5.
The requirement is: for a user to be able to link from within but also from outside of the portal to a specific piece of content on a portal page. This link (i.e. URL) is used to bookmark this piece of content in the user's browser, is sent in e-mails and
is used by our search engine (which runs outside of the portal) to create links back to the portal.
The "specific piece of information" is in our case for example a certain news article which can uniquely be referenced using an article ID. The portal page contains amongst others a content portlet which is used to show a certain news article. We also wan
t to have a related portlet that shows a list of 'related articles'. This page should be able to render itself by reading the information (the article ID) from the URL and by showing the corresponding information in the portlets (like the actual article).
Being able to bookmark a specific news item is of course very common for news portals. I am quite suprised that I cannot find any information on how to implement this kind of functionality in the WebSphere Portal Server documentation or even this forum. T
he closest I have come is the description of the URL Mapping mechanism in WPS 5 (but that only refers to the portal pages themselves, not the specific content within a portal page) and an article on integrating the Interwoven TeamSite CMS in WPS:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwor...2_seifried.html
In this article the writer refers to such content links as "Link to a specific content piece on a different portal page." His proposed solution is the same one that we have currently implemented which is to specify the content ID in a HTTP request paramet
er such as "contentid=1234". The paramater is non-portlet encoded because applications external to the portal must be able to construct these URLs. Because of this the portal page in question only has a single portlet instance of the content portlet insta
lled.
We would like to use a more generic mechanism to deal with these 'content specific portal page URLs' if such a mechanism exist. We also want to start using cooperative portlets (formerly known as click2action (C2A) portlets) so we have the idea of using o
ne portlet on the page to read the content ID from the URL and pass this information on to the other portlets on the page using C2A events.
Further complicating is the fact that we would like to have functionality to be able to bookmark the portal page showing the current content item. We cannot rely on the URL to always contain our request parameter(s) since the portal is in charge of creati
ng the URL in many circumstances (for example when a portlet goes into Edit mode). So we envisage a 'bookmark this article' button in the content portlet which creates the bookmarkable URL.
Anyway, if anybody has any good ideas on how to implement this nicely..
|