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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
Developing
This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
Developing basic PAA file applications
Solution developers can create their own Portal Application Archive (PAA) files. The developers can then use the Configuration Wizard to add on their applications to their HCL Digital Experience environment.
Create a Portal Application Archive (PAA) file
Use the Portal Application Archive (PAA) file format to install applications with the Solution Installer. The PAA file is a customized compressed file that contains an application. This application is installed on HCL Digital Experience with the ConfigEngine.
PAA file structure overview
Each PAA file is a structured ZIP compression file. Because the Solution installer uses Ant tasks to expand or parse the PAA file, it needs to be a ZIP compression file that can be decoded by the java.util.zip class.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
- Configuring
  Run the following tasks after you install and deploy HCL Digital Experience. They address tasks that are typically run one time and have a global effect. Some configuration changes are made more frequently or do not have a global effect. These tasks are addressed in the Administering section.
- Backup and restore
  Backup and recovery of data files and databases is an essential operation for any business system, particularly for data and applications that run in production environments. Create and follow a plan for backing up and recovering data on all tiers of your HCL Digital Experience deployment. IBM Installation Manager must also be included in backup and recovery planning. If you back up the HCL Portal file structure and then install a fix pack, your HCL Digital Experience and IBM Installation Manager become out of sync after you restore the HCL Portal file system. This condition is not recoverable.
- Migrating
  Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
- Integrating
  Integrate HCL Digital Experience with software such as HCL Sametime to enable your users to collaborate more easily. You can also use the unified task list portlet to integrate HCL with your backend business process software, such as IBM Process Server.
- Administering
  Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
- Securing
  Security tasks include setting up property extension databases and custom user repositories, configuring and activating SSL, and configuring authentication. In addition, tasks such as activating Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and NIST SP800-131a security modules and configuring external security managers such as Security Access Manager might be required to secure your portal environment.
- Monitoring
  HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
- Setting up a website
  Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
- Staging to production
  During portal solution development, the solution is initially developed, tested, and refined on one server or a limited number of servers. The solution is deployed later on live systems, referred to as the production environment. The process of moving the solution from the development environment to the production environment is called staging.
- Developing
  This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
  - Changing to a developer mode environment
    Install HCL Digital Experience and then immediately change to a developer mode environment. Use this environment when you develop applications, themes, portals, and portlets. Startup performance is improved within a developer mode environment.
  - Dojo and HCL Digital Experience
    HCL Digital Experience contains an instance of the Dojo Toolkit, a JavaScript library that is based on the Dojo Toolkit. When you develop components that use Dojo, you must be aware of how the portal uses Dojo, and the tips and restrictions when you use Dojo.
  - Extending HCL Portal class path
  - Developing themes and skins
    You can create themes using modules to contribute to separate areas of pages to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance. To optimize themes on your website, use the theme optimization module framework. The framework separates feature-specific logic and capabilities from the theme code.
  - URL generation in HCL Portal
    Generating Portal URLs correctly is one of the most important tasks in programming an HCL Portal based application. There are several programming tools and techniques available for generating HCL Portal URLs in custom code. The following section introduces the programming tools available and discusses when it is most appropriate to use each of the tools.
  - Model SPI overview
    Models provide information that is needed by HCL Portal to perform tasks such as content aggregation or building navigation to browse the aggregated content. The information that is aggregated is represented through models that can be accessed programmatically by using the Model SPI (read-only). The information of a model is usually persistent (stored in a database) but can also be transient (computed and stored only in memory). Models can be represented by using a tree structure (nodes have a parent-child relationship), a list structure, or a selection structure (a selected element in a tree structure).
  - Controller SPI
    You can use the Controller SPI for portal administration. It allows you to modify portal resources. It enhances the read-only portal Model SPI by adding writable aspects.
  - User and group management
    The Portal User Management Architecture (PUMA) System programming interface (SPI) provides interfaces for accessing the profiles of a portal User or Group.
  - Portal Access Control interfaces
    Portal Access Control provides interfaces for retrieving and modifying and access control information of portal resources, such as portlets or pages.
  - Developing portlets
    Get an overview of the process of creating portlets, learn about the concepts of the APIs used to develop portlets, and view the samples to get you started. Also, learn about integrating features such as single sign-on, cooperative sharing of information using the property broker, and migrating Struts applications to the portlet environment.
  - HCL DX Portlet Bridge support for JavaServer Faces 2.2
    HCL Digital Experience 8.5 and 9.5 includes the HCL Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JSF 2.2. The bridge provides customers an interface to developing and running JSF Portlets.
  - Web Developer Toolkit for HCL Digital Experience
    Learn more about what you can do with the Web Developer Toolkit for HCL Digital Experience.
  - The Script Application
    The Script Application enables script developers to create portlets for HCL Digital Experience with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
  - The HCL Web Content Manager API
    You can use the Web Content Manager API to extend functions of HCL Web Content Manager.
  - Search REST API specification
    The following topics describe-s- the API calls to search HCL Digital Experience. You can search HCL Digital Experience web pages and content to find content that contains a specific text string in its title or content, or is tagged with a specific tag.
  - Extending tagging and rating by using service APIs
    Developers can enhance and extend the tagging and rating features of the portal. For this purpose the portal tagging and rating feature provides service APIs that you can use to enhance tagging and rating by your requirements.
  - How to create a custom launch page
    You can configure an authoring portlet to use a launch page of your own design instead of the default user interface.
  - How to create a custom HTML editor integration
    You can use custom HTML editors in all HTML fields of the authoring interface or specific HTML elements that are defined in an authoring template. Custom HTML fields are used to integrate third-party editors into the authoring interface.
  - How to use remote actions
    Remote actions are used to trigger actions from the HCL Web Content Manager application.
  - How to create custom plug-ins
    A custom plug-in is a reusable Java class that you create to run a task. You can create custom plug-ins such as custom workflow actions, plug-ins to run when a page is rendered, plug-ins to store multi-locale text strings and plug-ins to run when a file is uploaded.
  - Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal
    You can use the Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal framework to integrate data from external data sources on your portal pages by using HCL Web Content Manager presentation components. External data means that the data does not need to be stored directly in HCL Web Content Manager. For example, you can use DDC to render social data that you have on your HCL Connections server or on other social platforms in the context of your portal pages. Other possible data sources include news feeds, task lists, product catalog information, to name just a few.
  - Determining the current web content context
    To determine the current web content context of a portal page or Web Content Viewer portlet, you can use the WCM Page Context Service. This service provides the ID of the currently rendered item of a page or portlet.
  - REST service for Web Content Manager
    Application developers can use Representational State Transfer (REST) services to work with Web Content Manager. The REST service for Web Content Manager provides authoring access to content items and elements. The service follows the Atom Publication Protocol, and Atom feeds, and entries are accessible in XML (application/atom+xml) and JSON (application/json) format.
  - HCL Experience API
    This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
  - How to display data from external sources
    You display data from external sources, such as SQL databases, by using the same methods as you would when you create a website.
  - Instrumenting web content for Active Site Analytics
    You can collect information from web content for Active Site Analytics.
  - Java messaging services for web content
    Web Content Manager supports for the notification of events such as item state changes, or services starting and stopping. These notifications can be delivered as messages to the Java messaging service.
  - Reference documents
    Reference copy of API, SPI, Javadoc, and more, for HCL Digital Experience 8.5 and 9.0.
  - Developing basic PAA file applications
    Solution developers can create their own Portal Application Archive (PAA) files. The developers can then use the Configuration Wizard to add on their applications to their HCL Digital Experience environment.
    - Checking server dependency
      When you install a Portal Application Archive (PAA) file, you must verify that the file is compatible with the current version of HCL Digital Experience.
    - PAA dependencies for deployment and removal
      The deployment and removal of a Portal Application Archive (PAA) file might depend on deployment of other PAA applications. You can specify the PAA dependencies for a PAA file in the assembly level sdd.xml file.
    - Create a Portal Application Archive (PAA) file
      Use the Portal Application Archive (PAA) file format to install applications with the Solution Installer. The PAA file is a customized compressed file that contains an application. This application is installed on HCL Digital Experience with the ConfigEngine.
      - PAA file structure overview
        Each PAA file is a structured ZIP compression file. Because the Solution installer uses Ant tasks to expand or parse the PAA file, it needs to be a ZIP compression file that can be decoded by the java.util.zip class.
        Documentation directory
        Place all documents and ID-related artifacts for the application in the documentation directory.
        Components directory
        The components directory and its sub-directories in the PAA file archive are where all deployable artifacts must be stored. If you examine the content of the components directory in the PortalServer_root/doc/paa-samples/Sample1.paa file, you see one component, sample1. There is always at least one component that is contained in a PAA file. However, there is no limit on the number of extra components that you can include.
      - Installation tasks
        Solution installer supports the auto generation of deployment tasks for specific resource types. The creation of these tasks occurs during the installation or registration phase for the PAA file with the Solution Installer and the ConfigEngine.
      - Order of installation of scripts and artifacts
        Often the order that scripts are run or artifacts that are deployed is important for the success of the installation. This information is both true for artifacts or scripts in a single component and the order in which scripts contained in multiple components are installed.
      - The sdd.xml file
        The sdd.xml files perform a number of different roles in the PAA file structure. They allow the developer to control, with ConfigEngine extension points, how an application is installed. They also inform the ConfigEngine of the type of installation to be processed. It also determines, in terms of the ConfigEngine, where the deployable files are stored after registration with the ConfigEngine.
      - Property files
        Two different types of properties are contained within a PAA distribution. They can be classified as being either user editable that is requiring user input, for example a database URL, or as developer-provided settings required for a component to function. However, for user convenience, a separation between user properties from those settings that are supplied by the developer is advised.
      - Database properties for the Solution Installer
        Some Portal Application Archive (PAA) files require access to an external database. The database properties are stored in either the assemblyName.properties file for the assembly or in the componentName.properties file of the component requiring database support.
      - Virtual portals in the PAA file
        There are many situations where a user might want to install the applications that are contained in a Portal Application Archive (PAA) file directly to a virtual portal.
  - Developing advanced PAA file applications
    Developers can create their own advanced Portal Application Archive (PAA) file. The advanced PAA file contains custom content. The developers can then use the Configuration Wizard to add on their applications to their HCL Digital Experience environment.
  - HCL UX Screen Flow Manager
    The HCL UX Screen Flow Manager helps operators, developers, and dialog modelers develop fine-granular, small split portlets. Learn to configure the sequence, transitions, and workflow of a set of screens.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

PAA file structure overview

Each PAA file is a structured ZIP compression file. Because the Solution installer uses Ant tasks to expand or parse the PAA file, it needs to be a ZIP compression file that can be decoded by the java.util.zip class.

At the top level of a PAA file is the root directory. There are no restrictions on the name of this directory; however, use something that is unique and does not clash with other registered PAA files or assemblies. There must be only one root directory in a PAA file. The name of this directory is significant because it is the reference name for your PAA content. It is the same value as the assemblyName when you create the assembly level sdd.xml file. Read The sdd.xml file for information.

You can find a sample top-level directory in the PortalServer_root/doc/paa-samples/sample1.paa file. The root directory contains the documentation and components directories and an sdd.xml file.

The sdd.xml file has the following roles:

It informs the ConfigEngine about the assembly of components.
It provides the ConfigEngine with the list of components and their locations within the directory structure.
It points to each component sdd.xml file so that the installation function can process the installation of the individual components.