XDIME navigation views

Different markup versions are used to provide varied views of the navigation model presented to the user. Similar to aggregators that are provided with the base portal product, each markup version of the XDIME aggregator is responsible for presenting the user with all of the pages, URLs, and portlets the user is entitled to see. Four XDIME markup versions are provided with Mobile Portal Accelerator: treeview, iconview, pdaview, and smartphone

All three of the XDIME markup versions that are shipped with Mobile Portal Accelerator share the following features:

They all support multiple levels of navigation (for example, a page can contain one or more child pages).
A page can contain one or more portlets. When a portlet title is selected the portlet is maximized.
The aggregator provides a means of restoring the portlet to “minimized” mode.
None of the markup versions support rendering portlets in “solo” mode.

The XDIME aggregator produces XDIME markup targeted at a wide variety of devices (PDAs, WML devices, XHTML devices, and others). The aggregator assists with rendering content to various devices, each with differing supported markups and capabilities. In addition to the device-specific layout support, you might decide to use different views based on the type of device making the request. For example, a service provider can display a two-dimensional array of icons on a PDA device, but display a text only list on a mobile device. Mobile Portal Accelerator supports these two modes by providing four different markup versions called tree (the default), icon, pda, and smartphone. These markup versions are selected by creating a Portal client profile that maps a markup and markup version to a particular user agent. For information about client profiles, see the WebSphere® Portal product documentation.

A special variation of the treeview is designed specifically for WML devices. It is optimized to send a WML deck, which contains cards that make up pages shown on the device. The XDIME aggregator generates the largest WML deck that does not exceed the devices buffer limit. It reduces the number of requests that WML devices need to make for information because multiple pages are pushed to the device on a single request.

The topics contained within this section provide information about the basic design of these navigation views. Each section implies a navigation tree similar to the one shown in Example navigation structure. This structure does not show which pages actually contain portlets, although it is implied that portlets do actually exist on one or more of the pages.

Note: This navigation structure contains pages, labels, and URLs. These WebSphere Portal concepts are covered in the documentation for WebSphere Portal. The term node, often used in this document, is a generic reference to a WebSphere Portal page, label, or URL.

Example navigation structure:

Content Root (root, level 0)
1. My Test Page 1 (page, level 1, not XDIME)
2. My Test Page 2 (page, level 1, XDIME, NOT accessible by user)
3. Home (label, level 1, XDIME, parent, and all children accessible by user)
  1. Mobile Portal (page, level 2)
    1. Entertainment (page level 3)
      1. Music (page, level 4)
      2. Movies (page, level 4)
      3. Television (page, level 4)
      4. Star Info (page, level 4)
    2. System Tools (page, level 3)
    3. News (page, level 3)
      1. AP Newswire (URL, level 4)
      2. UPI Newswire (URL, level 4)
      3. Reuters (URL, level 4)
    4. Weather (page, level 3)
      1. Local Weather (page, level 4)
      2. Satellite Images (page, level 4)
    5. HTML Stuff (page, level 3)
    6. WebCam (page, level 3)
4. My Test Page 3 (page, XDIME, accessible by user)

In this section, the navigation views present a banner with a WebSphere Portal image, and a text description of the current navigation location, for example, Entertainment. The navigation views also share skins code. Portlets in all of the navigation views share controls, for example, close or edit. All of the navigation views discard the page layout information that can be chosen by the WebSphere Portal administrator when portlets are added to a page.

The XDIME aggregator supports the ability to withhold content from the user based on their device type and other metadata configuration attributes. Metadata is configured using the extended attributes portlet.