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 brow
ser, is sent in e-mails and
is used by our search engine (which runs outside of the portal) to create li
nks back to the portal.

The "specific piece of information" is in our case for example a certain new
s article which can uniquely be referenced using an article ID. The portal p
age contains amongst others a content portlet which is used to show a certai
n news article. We also wan
t to have a related portlet that shows a list of 'related articles'. This pa
ge should be able to render itself by reading the information (the article I
D) 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 new
s portals. I am quite suprised that I cannot find any information on how to 
implement this kind of functionality in the WebSphere Portal Server document
ation or even this forum. T
he closest I have come is the description of the URL Mapping mechanism in WP
S 5 (but that only refers to the portal pages themselves, not the specific c
ontent within a portal page) and an article on integrating the Interwoven Te
amSite CMS in WPS:
http://www-106.ibm.com/developerwor... />
fried.html

In this article the writer refers to such content links as "Link to a specif
ic content piece on a different portal page." His proposed solution is the s
ame one that we have currently implemented which is to specify the content I
D in a HTTP request paramet
er such as "contentid=1234". The paramater is non-portlet encoded because ap
plications external to the portal must be able to construct these URLs. Beca
use of this the portal page in question only has a single portlet instance o
f the content portlet insta
lled.

We would like to use a more generic mechanism to deal with these 'content sp
ecific portal page URLs' if such a mechanism exist. We also want to start us
ing 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 inf
ormation 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 ca
nnot rely on the URL to always contain our request parameter(s) since the po
rtal 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 portle
t which creates the bookmarkable URL.

Anyway, if anybody has any good ideas on how to implement this nicely..

[ Post a follow-up to this message ]