Dynamically Updating Content Server Portlets

Question

[urlHi, I am currently having difficulty dynamically updating content server portlets.  I have a portlet of the following form:[/url]
ArticleName Author Title Date mystory author1 title1 04/05/01
story2 author2 title2 06/07/04
story author3 title3 01/02/03
So I have this table where each one of the line items is an article in the content server. So, for example the first line item is an article "mystory" by "author1", with title "title1" and date "04/05/01" additionally there is an article text field, but this isn't displayed unless I click on the article name.
I can set up the basics of this portlet, but when I try to add any real functionality I run into one of two problems.
First Problem: Passing Information
I cannot find a way to pass information between content portlets. For instance, if the user would like to "re-sort" this table based on "date", I would like to have the user click on the "date" column heading and then reload the page. To do so, I would have to pass the section name back to the page so that it could resort based on this data. I have not found anyway to effectively pass information to a content server portlet. I am building these pages through use of the presentation template framework (so I can have access to the content items) but that seems to change the way portlets are handled.
I got around this limitation with a regular portlet by creating an intermediary page which captures passed information and stores it to the session state. Once the information was in the session state, it is accessible to the portlet on the first page. However, this only works because remote portlets do not change their session id once loaded. Content Server portlets, on the other hand, change their session id after every reload of the browser or page change. I can send information from a content server portlet to an intermediary page, but I cannot send it back to the portlet because the session id has changed so I have no idea of knowing where to send the information. I can write it to a session state, but by the time I return to the portal page, the content server has changed its session id so it does not know where to look any longer.
I suppose it would be possible to create an application state variable and append it with some static token (if there is some static variable per portal session) but I would rather not have to deal with application variables if at all possible.
Second Problem: Dynamically Updating PCS Tags
Even if I were able to the pass information back to my content server portlet, I run into another issue. The easiest way to sort content server items is using the filter command in the pcs:foreach tag. So, if I wanted to sort by author name, I could do something like the following <pcs:foreach var="item" expr="filter(folderByName('content'), filtered.name == '"name")" or something like that (the syntax may be incorrect, I just wrote this off the top of my head). However, it appears that the way the presentation templates are compiled goes in the order of PCS tags THEN JSP. So I would have no way of dynamically changing the variable on which I sort. For example, if I clicked on "Date" above in my table, I would like to be able to dynamically change my code so that I sort on date, and not name. I cannot find a solution to this problem.
My workaround is to use the pcs tags to write out all the possible sortings to java array objects. This gives me access to the data on a JSP level and based on whatever the user will chose, I could then display that array. While this works, it is extremely ghetto and inefficient. Any help or suggestions would be fantastic.
Thanks a lot,
Jason Grauel

Answer 1

You can use just about any javascript you want in any Content Server presentation template including ones that are used for portlets.
However, you should be careful to name javascript functions and global variables uniquely so that they do not conflict with any other javascript on the page. To do this, you can append the item id to function and variable names, for example,
function doSomething<pcs:value expr="pcs_id"></pcs:value>() {
return true;
Randy