This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content 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.
Learn about the advanced concepts of the HCL UX Screen Flow Manager.
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.
Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest 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.
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 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.
Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
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.
Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
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.
HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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 provides interfaces for retrieving and modifying and access control information of portal resources, such as portlets or pages.
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 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.
Learn more about what you can do with the Web Developer Toolkit for HCL Digital Experience.
The Script Application enables script developers to create portlets for HCL Digital Experience with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
You can use the Web Content Manager API to extend functions of HCL Web Content Manager.
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.
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.
You can configure an authoring portlet to use a launch page of your own design instead of the default user interface.
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.
Remote actions are used to trigger actions from the HCL Web Content Manager application.
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.
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.
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.
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.
This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
You display data from external sources, such as SQL databases, by using the same methods as you would when you create a website.
You can collect information from web content for Active Site Analytics.
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 copy of API, SPI, Javadoc, and more, for HCL Digital Experience 8.5 and 9.0.
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.
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.
To develop screen flows you need to create user interface artifacts, interconnect the artifacts and deploy the artifacts.
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.
You can use the Portal Access Control (PAC) to control what users can do when they are working with dialogs.
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.
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.
In a default HCL Portal installation, the Dialog Stack and Dialog State Display portlets are deployed. The following topics describe how these portlets function.
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.
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.
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.
Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
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 HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
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 is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
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