Add Portlet Customization

Question

Hi Everybody,
I'd like to create a more friendly and simple interface for my user choose between hide and show any portlet in one page.
Does anybody have any simple idea about how i get it?
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Hi Yuri,
Yes, portlets can be minimized by using both the PL/SQL and the Java API, there is no difference.
There are plans to make a minimizable portlet available in the portal community. For the time being, you can give it a try and do it on your own.
I've summarized the steps I've taken, and would be glad if you'd provide feedback whether you succeed.
How to add the 'Minimize/Restore' feature to your portlet?
Assumptions:
o You already have a working Java portlet
o You have registered your provider so that the login frequency
is 'Once Per User Session'
This solution uses the following PDK-Java services:
o Parameter passing
o Session storage
o Personalization
High level steps:
1) Create two images as the minimize and restore icons.
2) Make the images available for the browser (eg: copy the images
to the /images folder of Apache and make sure they can be
accessed.)
3) Render the minimize or restore image, according to the current
state of the portlet in the top right corner.
4) Put a hyperlink on the images:
pageURL&size=minimize (if the portlet size is normal) or
pageURL&size=restore (if the portlet is minimized)
5a) When rendering the portlet, read the parameters.
Push the read parameter to the sesssion storage
and to the personalization storage as well.
(The session storage is used when navigating to another page,
and coming back later, but the parameter is not available in
the URL any more, while the customization is used for the
cases when the user logs out in the meantime or closes the
browser, but wants to restore the state of the portlet as
it was by the time the session was closed.)
5b) If there is no parameter passed to the portlet, read the
session storage.
5c) If there is no session information available about the portlet
state, read the customization value. Push the read value to
the session storage.
6) Render the entire portlet (normal), or don't render it (minimize)
according to the parameters/session/customization information
read in 5a-5c
Additional feature:
If you stop here, in new portal sessions the portlet is rendered
in the same mode as it was rendered last time just before having
logged out (as saved in personalization data).
As an extra customization option you may add how you want
to render the portlet when starting a new portal session (logging
on again):
o normal (regardless of the last time)
o minimized (regardless of the last time)
o as left last time
Thanks,
Peter
<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:</font><HR>Originally posted by Yuri Alekhin ([email protected]):
Hi Peter,
I am using PL/SQL PDK to create portlets:
I am trying to minimize portlet programmatically and display another one instead. Is there a PL/SQL API for this?
Any ideas?
Thank you in advance.<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>
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