1. uPortal3 navigation features
Fall’05 developer meeting
day 2

2. uPortal3 Navigation
Colliers’ presentation

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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

6. 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)

7. 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 ?

8. 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

9. 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