Writing an aggregator for Active Site Analytics | HCL Digital Experience

The portal themes that come with HCL Portal write the data that Active Site analytics needs into the markup. The data is provided in the form of microformats, which are injected into the markup during rendering.

The scripts that retrieve this data from the page markup are called aggregators. After retrieving the relevant microformat instances, the aggregator typically submits the collected data to an external analytics service where the data is then recorded, processed, and formatted in the form of reports.

The portal provides a client side JavaScript SPI that you can use to implement aggregators. The SPI is named Active Site Analytics Mediator SPI.

Aggregators that are based on the Active Site Analytics Mediator SPI behave consistently in HCL Portal, irrespective of the render mode of the portal page to which the aggregator is applied. This includes server side aggregation rendering and client side aggregation rendering modes. An aggregator can capture the latest data that is relevant for Active Site Analytics even in the client side aggregation mode that uses Ajax technologies to refresh individual page parts that are part of the DOM. Beyond that, the SPI also supports custom Ajax applications that can be part of a portal page.

From a programming model perspective, the Active Site Analytics Mediator SPI allows aggregator implementations to register callback functions; the portal framework calls these functions to notify the aggregator about DOM changes that can be relevant for Active Site Analytics. Upon receiving such notifications, aggregators can parse the DOM to find the relevant microformats to send this information to the analytics service.