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IBM Web Content Manager

July 3, 2018

How to reset page navigation component to render the content items from first page in IBM WCM

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager, IBM WebSphere No Reply

The problem

When working with navigation components, it is common to share the same pagination in several menu or personalization components, however this introduces an issue because when clicking on the “Next” or “Previous” page the URL is going to have a parameter with the paging state which causes the problem of keeping the page as the last clicked option.

The solution;

IBM WCM provides a parameter to force the pagination component to render from the very first page. This parameter can be appended in the query string when generating links within the pagination component: WCM_Page.ResetAll=TRUE.

April 26, 2018

What is a render parameter in IBM WCM and how it is related to the Plugin RenderParam?

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager No Reply

Today, while I was reading the IBM WCM plugins documentation I found a plugin called The render parameter plug-in, which definition is formally:

Use the RenderParam rendering plug-in to access public and private render parameters from your web content.

Taken from The render parameter plug-in article in IBM Knowledge Center.

So, these questions came into my mind:

  • what is it considered a “render parameter”?
  • Any example or use case?

I asked these questions in our Slack Base22 channel, and here is what I got:

Technical Definition

Render Parameters are a Portlet 2.0 (JSR286) feature that allow for coordination between portlets and are useful for building composite applications out of portlet components. Portlet 1.0 only had the portlet application session scope for coordination (only usable within one portlet application, not across portlet applications). 2.0 introduced public render params providing greater ability for cross-portlet communication. IBM describes them as follows:

Public render parameters allow JSR 286 portlets to share navigational state information. They are specially useful for coordinating the multiple navigation or viewer portlets that display different information items that are all related to the same parameter name. The portal stores all portlet render parameters, including public render parameters, as an encoded part of the current portal URL. Therefore, public render parameters are correctly preserved by typical browser navigation actions such as the Back button and bookmarking.

Taken from Public render parameters article in IBM Knowledge Center.

Here is a conclusion, given by Cody Burleson:

My guess, therefore, is that the plugin allows you to intercept (parse) render parameters from the URL, which may have been sent to the page by some portlet on the same or another page. This was probably introduced most specifically in support of the Script Portlet.

The usefulness can be best understood from the example use cases found here in this article about Inter-Portlet Communication in IBM Script Portlet Using Public Render Parameters

In short: You can send data from one (IBM Script) portlet to another (even to another portlet on different portal page) and use the plugin in WCM to get a handle on the data that was sent.

Simple Possible Example: Script portlet 1 creates a menu. Script portlet 2 renders body of selected item. Content ID is sent from portlet 1 to portlet 2 via public render param.

Have you used this IBM WCM plugin? I will be glad to read more about it.

See you next time.

April 16, 2018

How to use Plugin CopyText in IBM WCM 8.5 and 9

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager No Reply

carita-feliz

The problem

Being able to process text using client code is useful for many reasons, for example: sometimes you want to cut text or extract specific patterns, etc. However, we usually have a issues because of special characters like line breaks (\n), let’s go back for a moment to remember how a well-formatted JavaScript variable looks:

As you see, previous variable is well-defined, everything looks good; but what happen if the “value” is something like this:

Previous variable definition is going to fail because \n character is not valid! you could answer, well lets’ use template strings… but those ones are not compatible with our “favorite” browser: Internet Explorer, so avoid the temptation.

The solution

Ok, now the question is: is there any feature of IBM WCM to clean those line breaks? Sure, there is, just add the CopyText plugin as in following block which is not intended for this kind of tasks but it works smoothly:

For example, let’s imagine we are reading the description of pieces of content:

After applying the plugin, no more break lines will make our front-end to be broken 🙂

That’s it for today, be happy with your code, see you soon!

February 15, 2018

How to use the Plugin Otherwise in IBM WCM 8 and 9

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager No Reply

challenge_accepted

The challenge

Imagine you want to run a kind of conditional if with a fallback (else) for example: you would like to have some custom HTML markup when there is no description set on a piece of content. Let’s see following pseudocode:

So, how could we emulate this behaviour on IBM WCM? Simple…

The solution

Let’s use a server-side solution using the NotEquals plugin, which is really easy to apply, let’s see an example:

 Explanation

The plugin NotEquals requires two mandatory parameters: text1 and text2 (both strings). In this example, we have text1=”” compared with text2=”[Property context=”current” type=”content” field=”description”].

When WCM renders this HTML with the [Property] meta-tag, it will compare the text2 with text1 and if text2 is not empty, the HTML inside the NotEquals plugin will be rendered, otherwise (else) no HTML will be generated. Simple and elegant.

However… be careful when combining / nesting conditionals:

Previous conditional will not work, since the Otherwise plugin is not going to know under which context should act.

IBM provides a way to solve this using what is is called scope. Let’s change a bit our code to set this scope parameter in BOTH NotEquals and Otherwise plugins.

Otherwise plugin restrictions

The Otherwise plugin ONLY works with:

  • Equals plug-in
  • NotEquals plug-in
  • Matches plug-in

I hope you find this information useful, and remember, be happy with your code!

August 18, 2016

How to know if a user is authenticated or not in WCM 8 and 8.5

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager No Reply

Lock-simple-128

This is pretty simple way to check if any user has a session started or not; this is useful in cases where you want to display or execute an specific code depending on the user session. To create this kind of validation we can take advantage of the WCM plugins Equals and NotEquals

 

October 8, 2015

How to detect user devices: smartphone, tablet or desktop in IBM WCM 8.5 using tags

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager, IBM WebSphere, Mobile Development 7 Replies

devices

The context: why should I need to know this stuff?

In the last years front-end web development has became one of the most exciting areas of IT and software development, as front-end developers we have a tone of new tools, APIs, editors, packages, etc. that make our life easier.

There is an area that is particularly interesting: Responsive web design, but now, we try to go a little bit further, and not only create amazing responsive web sites, but also we try to provide the best web experience for our visitors, there is one aspect that is in particular really important when we create web portals: loading the resources depending on the device, it doesn’t matter if it is an smartphone, a tablet or a high resolution desktop; we must provide different views per device, and here is when something come out!

Most of websites are responsive but many times the views or layouts only hide or show graphic elements (like menus, carousels, blocks, etc.) that means all the resources are loaded even if they will not be used on phones or tablets.

The IBM proposal

Instead of just hiding or displaying elements depending on fixed media queries, we can provide a better mechanism which is called Adaptive Web Design. When we talk about adaptive, we mean we must load only the resources that are really necessary for displaying our views depending on the user’s device, for example if I have a list of news but in desktops I show titles, summaries, and images, but in smartphones I am only interested in displaying the titles, why in the phones should I load the summaries and images.

IBM WCM 8.x (that stands for IBM Web Content Manager) as a private product has a great solution for providing Adaptive Enterprise Web Portals, what it basically does is to expose a set of plugins that help us decide which resources we are going to load depending on the user’s device.

Let’s see how this kind of blocks look in the simplest way:

Now, if we want to show some specific content or components for desktop and tablets we can use the “negative” syntax of this plugin

Let’s see the example

Going back a bit… in our component to display a set of news we can follow next steps to have an adaptive content per device:

  • For desktop and tablets where we have more space to distribute our news (titles, thumbnails, summaries, etc.), so, it makes sense to include more HTML elements.
  • For smartphone since we have less space available we don’t render all the information but instead just the titles.

Desktop and tablet

Let’s imagine this is a fragment of the results of a menu or personalization component:

The rendered HTML content would be something like this:

Smartphone

And in the smartphone we can have a simpler version of the same component including only the title like this:

In this case we would have this kind of output:

Pretty simple, doesn’t it?

I hope you find this short article useful for your future implementations and remember be happy with your code!

See you next time!

 

September 28, 2015

How to use Plugin Equals in IBM WCM 8 and 8.5

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager 2 Replies

challenge_accepted

The challenge

Let’s imagine you are in a menu component in WCM, and you want to validate if some pieces of content has a very specific value in their Keywords property; in case they have it we would like to add a featured CSS class to the rendered HTML.

The solution

Following is an example about how to use the plugin Equals in IBM WCM 8 and 8.5:

 Explanation

  • The plugin Equals requires two parameters: text1 and text2. In this example, we have text1=”[Property field=”keywords”]” and value2=”featured”.
  • When WCM renders this HTML with meta-tags will compare text1 and text2 in orden to see if both are equals, in case of true, the CSS class featured will be added.

I hope you find useful this information and you use in your next WCM implementation, and remember, be happy with your code!

April 9, 2015

How to use Plugin jsencode in IBM WCM 8.5

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager No Reply

carita-feliz

The problem

JSON is the current format by excellence for sending messages and getting information via web services. But we usually have a big problem because of special characters like double quotes, let’s go back for a moment to remember how a well-formatted JSON looks:

As you know, previous is a well-formatted JSON block, but what happen if the “value” is something like this:

Previous code is going to fail for sure! and that’s because we are using double quotes in the “definitive” word as the value for the title, which breaks the well-formatted JSON we created.

The solution

Ok, now what can we do if we have IBM WCM 8.5 version? Easy, just add the jsencode plugin in next format:

For example if you want to encode the title of pieces of content:

What kind of output will we get using this plugin?

Finally, if you need to encode many fields, this is more complex example which encodes the author, title, siteTitle and the summary.

Explanation

The principle behind this is simple: for every single JSON value using the plugin jsencode, WCM -behind the scenes- is going to execute a procedure to encode the HTML before rendering the page, which solves the issue in a great way!

That’s it for today, don’t forget to be happy with your code!

April 9, 2015

How to use Plugin ifNotEmpty in IBM WCM 8 and 8.5

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager No Reply

challenge_accepted

The challenge

Imagine you want to know if there is a non-empty value in any element of a Authoring Template, because if there is no value, then a set of HTML tags should not be generated; well, maybe you could solve this problem by using a small JavaScript code, but, let’s face it, most of our user don’t have a really great connection and since the JavaScript is executed completely in  the client, the user experience could not be the best possible.

The solution

Ok, we have a server-side solution using the ifNotEmpty plugin, which is really easy to use, let’s see an example:

 Explanation

The plugin ifNotEqual requires one mandatory parameter: value (which is basically an string). In this example, we have value=”[Element context=”current” type=”content” key=”linkURL”]”.
When WCM renders this HTML with the [Element] meta-tag, it will compare the value and if it is not empty, the HTML inside the plugin will be rendered, otherwise no HTML will be generated. So, as simple as that, we validate the element value and depending on it, we generate some HTML.

I hope you find this information useful, and remember, be happy with your code!

September 23, 2014

How to use Plugin ifNotEqual in IBM WCM 8+

Enterprise Development, IBM Web Content Manager 1 Reply

challenge_accepted

The challenge

Imagine you are in a navigation component in WCM, but you want to ignore pieces of content in an specific level of your navigator (for example ignore contents only on the second level) and display them in another level (for example, show the contents only in the third level), well, by default the navigation component has a parameter called “Show Content” which can be used to include ALL the content recursively, but it is not possible neither ignore nor show contents.

The solution

Following is an example about how to use the plugin ifNotEqual in IBM WCM 8:

 Explanation

  • The plugin ifNotEqual requires two parameters: value1 and value2. In this example, we have value1=”Dashboard Landing Page” and value2=”[Property…]”.
  • When WCM renders this HTML with meta-tags will compare value1 and value2 in orden to see if both are not equals, in case of true, the HTML will be rendered, otherwise no HTML will be generated.

I hope you find useful this information and you use in your next WCM implementation, and remember, be happy with your code!

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Alex Arriaga
Alex is an experienced technology professional. Currently, he belongs to Base22; a family with a lot of awesome people!
He loves Computer Sciences and consider himself passionate about research and its application to any aspect of life.
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  • The important thing in science is not so much to obtain new facts as to discover new ways of thinking about them Sir William Bragg

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I believe that to change the world, all you need is a little creativity, programming skills, and like-minded friends who will read your blog and newsletter. Join me and we will do it together.
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