uPortal3 navigation features Fall’05 developer meeting day 2

uPortal3 Navigation Colliers’ presentation

uPortal3: navigation discussion topics Common preferences portlet –Making use of Marks’ administrative channel work –What other administrative features can be included? AJAX features –Gradual improvements Enhance the base –Single-portlet refresh –Lazy loading Can do theme transform on the client May look weird –Drag-and-drop portlet management

uPortal 3: URL construction and processing Parameter processors –Independent, serving specific framework components –Protlet, UserLayout, Transformer, persistence controller URL constructors –Independent, but can make use of common base syntax provider to have a common style –Can be aware of internal states of other components URL decorators –automatically invoked constructors –used to reflect states of framework components

uPortal 3: URL construction and processing Configuration-specific URL syntax –Can be very flexible (i.e. human-writable URLs) –May not implement all of the features for different components –Can be configured on per-component basis –Not packaged – a set of parameter processors and URL constructors that need to be injected/configured within the portal context uP2 syntax support –can and will be implemented –limiting in a number of cases Example: explicit structure and theme separation

uPortal 3: default URL syntax Encoding navigation state –Purpose: bookmarking, URL chopping –Example: –Implementation: decorator that’s aware of the structure transform preferences and their meaning parameter processor that analyzes secondary path –Generalization: stylesheet description declares navigation params/attributes (hard to do as nice of a syntax)

uPortal 3: default URL syntax Encoding navigation state: problems –What is “myTab” ? Is that a tab name (English only) or a tab id ? –How to separate request path element processing portal context is currently resolved by the first path element –Is there a nice syntax for other nav. state variables ?

uPortal 3: default URL syntax Returning to a bookmark: authentication –Personal tab Need to know what user the tab belongs to – Need to authenticate before content can be shown –Guest-accessible portlet (bookmark by fname) Can be shown initially without additional authentication User can authenticate later

uPortal3: URL generation in stylesheets Framework stylesheets –Generate a lot of URLs, using different constructors Portlet stylesheets Current approach: use Xalan extensions –see Confluence page