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HCL Digital Experience 9.5
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HCL Digital Experience 9.5
Developing
This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
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.
Advanced concepts
Learn about the advanced concepts of the HCL UX Screen Flow Manager.
HCL Digital Experience 9.5
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).
Uninstall Digital Experience - Traditional deployment
Uninstalling the Digital Experience software is a multiple-step process and the method you use is dependent upon your configuration. Removing HCL Portal in a single-server configuration is different from removing HCL Portal from a cluster. Manual uninstallation instructions are provided for a single-server configuration in case of an error situation.
Creating your website
Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
Digital Experience on non-containerized platforms
Learn how to deploy HCL Digital Experience as a non-containerized application and optimize web content and applications to deliver differentiated, personalized experiences for your customers.
Digital Experience on containerized platforms
Learn how to deploy HCL Digital Experience as a cloud-native platform and optimize business-critical digital experiences for your customers.
Digital Experience application deployment
This section outlines features and functionality delivered as part of continuous integration and continuous delivery for HCL Digital Experience.
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.
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.
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.
Developing screen flows
To develop screen flows you need to create user interface artifacts, interconnect the artifacts and deploy the artifacts.
Advanced concepts
Learn about the advanced concepts of the HCL UX Screen Flow Manager.
Retrieve and store event payload
In a normal portal environment, the portlets in a single dialog can exchange data through a set of well-defined events. However, you might want to include third-party portlets or older portlets that are not aligned with the normal portal environment. You can include such portlets with the HCL UX Screen Flow Manager.
Access control
You can use the Portal Access Control (PAC) to control what users can do when they are working with dialogs.
Scoping session data and render parameters
The appearance of portlets heavily relies on the portlet session data and the render parameters. To better support the semi-parallel processing of dialogs, the portlet session data and the render parameters are stored in a scoped fashion.
Dynamic pages and portlets
The HCL UX Screen Flow Manager not only supports redirecting users between static portal resources, but also between dynamic resources. The HCL Portal feature Dynamic UI Management is used.
User interface components
In a default HCL Portal installation, the Dialog Stack and Dialog State Display portlets are deployed. The following topics describe how these portlets function.
Configuration options
To change the overall behavior of the HCL UX Screen Flow Manager, several configuration options are available. You specify the options as Resource Environment Provider (REP) properties.
Staging and migration
For staging or migration purposes, you can use the portal XML configuration interface (XMLAccess) to transfer HCL UX Screen Flow Manager related data from one system to another.
Transitions reference
You can configure transitions in multiple ways. For example, with single portlets as source, you can configure it to transition to targets such as single portlets, multiple portlets through single or multiple transition endpoints, single page, or mixed resources. Similarly, you can configure single portlets, multiple portlets, single page, or mixed resources to become the source and transition to the target single portlet. The following reference topics show the code samples for these transitions.
Container-only features
Learn about features available for your container platform deployments.
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.
The Woodburn Studio demo site
The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
Troubleshooting
This section helps you resolve problems, use diagnostic tools and tracing to capture HCL Digital Experience system errors.
Reference
View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.
Glossary
This glossary includes terms and definitions for HCL Digital Experience.
Advanced concepts
Learn about the advanced concepts of the HCL UX Screen Flow Manager.
Retrieve and store event payload | HCL Digital Experience
In a normal portal environment, the portlets in a single dialog can exchange data through a set of well-defined events. However, you might want to include third-party portlets or older portlets that are not aligned with the normal portal environment. You can include such portlets with the HCL UX Screen Flow Manager.
Access control
You can use the Portal Access Control (PAC) to control what users can do when they are working with dialogs.
Scoping session data and render parameters
The appearance of portlets heavily relies on the portlet session data and the render parameters. To better support the semi-parallel processing of dialogs, the portlet session data and the render parameters are stored in a scoped fashion.
Dynamic pages and portlets
The HCL UX Screen Flow Manager not only supports redirecting users between static portal resources, but also between dynamic resources. The HCL Portal feature Dynamic UI Management is used.
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