The Extended Properties portlet provides a set of pages for configuring the display attributes and rules of nodes in the mobile portal's navigation hierarchy.
Overview
IBM® Mobile Portal Accelerator allows a wireless device to navigate and view a WebSphere® Portal website. The navigation hierarchy consists of a set of pages, URLs, and portlets (referred to as nodes). Each node may have associated properties which describe characteristics of the node within the mobile portal's navigation hierarchy. Common characteristics include icon information and device capability requirements such as the ability to render color or sound.The Extended Properties portlet enables the administrator to configure the following properties for most nodes. Some properties apply only to pages or nodes that support the XDIME markup.
- Icon Resource
- an asset name from the Multi-Channel Server (MCS) policy repository used to construct the best icon URL for the requesting device. MCS uses the resource name and device characteristics to return the URL of the best image for that device. This property takes precedence over Icon URL.
- Icon URL
- direct URL of an image file. Use this property only when an Icon
Resource is not available. Note: If you use the Icon URL option you must ensure that the image type referenced by the URL can be displayed for all devices that will access the node for which extended properties are being configured. Mobile Portal Accelerator does not perform checking to see if the device supports the type of image referenced in the URL.Tip: If you want Mobile Portal Accelerator to check if the device supports images and select an appropriate image type, use the Icon Resource option.
- Render Mode
- specifies the display mode of a portlet as either normal or maximized
mode.
When you use the Extended Properties portlet to change a portlet's render mode in a clustered setup, changes made at one node (the primary node) might not be visible at the other node (the secondary node). In order for the changes to take effect, you might need to restart the secondary node. (This occurs only for portlets, not for pages.)
As an alternative to restarting the secondary node, follow these steps:
- On the secondary node, open the WebSphere Portal Administration console.
- Navigate to the page that contains the portlets for which you changed the render mode at the primary node.
- Select the portlet whose render mode you changed.
- Click the portlet's Edit Extended Attributes icon.
- In the display, you will see that the render mode you selected at the primary node is reflected at the secondary node, but it is not rendered. Click OK.
This action will cause the changes to be visible at the secondary node when the portlet is rendered.
- Navigation Title
- the heading that will be displayed to separate a portlet rendered in Normal mode from the other content on the page.
The following device requirement rules are used to determine whether or not a node should be displayed for a given client device:
- Device capabilities
- rules indicating device capability prerequisites necessary to
see a node. Mobile Portal Accelerator supports
the following device capability rules:
- Image capable
- Color capable
- Sound output capable
- Client access types - accepted formats for images, video, sound, and other formats.
- Device type
- rules indicating required device manufacturers or models. The
following device type rules can be specified for a node:
- Manufacturer
- Model
- Class (for example, PDA, phone)
- View in the smartphone theme
- The type of view a customer wants to use to display nodes if a
smartphone is detected. The different views are:
- Accordion (default view if the smartphone theme view is selected).
- Carousel
- Tabbed
- PDA (the fallback view if JavaScript is not supported)
Common tasks
- Configure icon property for a node
- Limit access to a node by device characteristics, manufacturer, or model
- Edit customized device requirements
- Set the short title
- Configure render mode for a portlet
- Set the navigation title for a page
For additional details on performing these tasks, see the online help of the Extended Attributes portlet.
Reloading the user interface from the attribute descriptor file
The administrator must perform this task whenever the attribute descriptor file is updated. Changes to the attribute descriptor file are reflected in the user interface only after the reload is performed.
To reload the user interface, the administrator should open the page by clicking the wrench icon. Then, click Click to reload the user interface from the XML descriptor file.
./ConfigEngine.sh init task_name -DPortalAdminPwd=WP_admin_password_value -DWasPassword=WAS_admin_password_value
ConfigEngine init task_name -DPortalAdminPwd=WP_admin_password_value -DWasPassword=WAS_admin_password_value- task_name is the name of the configuration task being invoked (for example, mcs-deploy-mcs)
- WP_admin_password_value is the value of the WebSphere Portal admin password
- WAS_admin_password_value is the value of the WebSphere Application Server admin password if WebSphere Application Server security is enabled
Limitations
- You cannot use the Extended Properties portlet to configure device requirements that limit content based on a device's model or manufacturer for devices that do not have a unique user agent. Many PDAs fall into this category.
- Properties and rules associated with a portlet apply to all instances of the portlet. To specify unique properties and rules for multiple instances of a portlet, you must use the Portal Manage Portlets application to copy the portlet first. Then specify unique properties and rules for each copy.
- The root node will always be displayed. Extended Properties that limit when the root node will be displayed will be ignored.