How to parameterize pages or books

Question

Hi all,
in our project we need to handle navigation entries in different ways. Therefore we thought about customizing the skeleton jsp to behave different when rendering menu entries for special pages or books.
We were looking for something like:
<c:choose>
<c:when test="${pagepc.myProperty=true}">
....do something special here...
</c:when>
<c:otherwise>
Question: Is it possible to parameterize pages or books? I hoped to find a properties view in portal console - but there is none.
Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

You need to add the properties or Meta Data on the consumers page not the producers. Even though you are remoting the page the page is not really remoted (only the portlets on the page).
If this is not an option you may want to look into something around custom data transfer, but I really don't think this information should be coming from the producer. As the producer just produces portlets, and they shouldn;t really be tightly coupled to the page they are on.
As far as the EL, I'm not too sure but there are two methods on the PresentationContext. I don't think these two lend themselves very well to EL, you can always write a scriplet.
* Return the metadata elements for this control matching the supplied name
* @return a MetaData element if a match is found otherwise null.
public MetaData getMetaData(String name)
* Return the metadata elements for this control
* @return a non null array of <code>MetaData<code/> objects
public MetaData[] getMetaDatas()
For the properties
* Get the extra properties string of the component, if it exists. This value may be null.
* Properties are formatted as in the following example:
* <pre><b>
* my-first-key: my-first-value; my-second-key: my-second-value;
* </b></pre>
* Any number of properties may be in a properties string.
* @return
* The control's extra properties, if set
* @see
* #getParsedProperties
public String getProperties()
* Get the extra properties of the component, if they exist. This value will not be null.
* The <code>Properties</code> class returned by this method is the parsed view of
* those from {@link #getProperties()}.
* @return
* The control's extra properties, if set; an empty Properties instance if not
* @see
* #getProperties
public Properties getParsedProperties()
* Get a property of the underlying component. This is a convenience method.
* The <code>key</code> argument should not be null.
* @param key
* The property key
* @return
* The value associated with the specified key, if it exists
public String getProperty(String key)
BTW: if you are doing a lot of these say > 100, I'd recommend the properties vs the Meta Data.