IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Profile Selection via IBM WebSphere Portal Personalization Rules

Transcription

1 IBM WebSphere Portlet Factory Profile Selection via IBM WebSphere Portal Personalization Rules This article describes customization of WebSphere Portlet Factory (WPF) portlets using the WebSphere Portal (WP) Personalization Rules framework. Overview WebSphere Portlet Factory allows you to customize portlets, widgets and web applications by profiling WPF builder inputs and then choosing profile values for those builder inputs from profile sets, using WP's Edit and Config modes (Personalize, Shared Settings and Configure) or via a custom profile selection handler, which can choose values based on custom logic. WPF provides several out of the box profile selection handlers, including one that selects based on WebSphere Portal Group membership, one for LDAP lookups, and another for J2EE Role based selection. Source for a couple of profile selection handlers is also provided, to help you build your own, based on your own custom logic and APIs. As of version 6.1, one of the WPF provided selection handlers is based on WebSphere Portal Personalization Rules. It allows you to specify a named PZN rule in the handler's configuration file, and then the results of the rule will be matched against the profile names or against external associations specified per profile in the advanced section of the profile set editor, as shown below. Note, please be aware that WPF uses the term profiling to mean customizing a WPF portlet or application by supplying different builder inputs, and profile to mean a particular group of profiled inputs to be used for a given customized application (eg, for a specific type of user), while WP Personalization has it's own similar terms such as Profiler (type of personalization rule) and Profile (value returned from a personalization rule). While they are intended for similar uses, the terms come from different product backgrounds and are not necessarily identical in meaning, so please be careful while reading the various documentation on these features to remember which product (WPF customization or WP Personalization) the term you are reading about is referring to. Example Some of these screen shots were taken using WebSphere Portal 6.0.1, but the same general process may be used to set this up to work with WebSphere Portal 6.1. From the WebSphere Portal Administration Page, select "Personalization" to bring up the user interface for creating and managing personalization rules.

2 Then, from the "Business Rules" tab of the Personalization menu, select "New" -> "Rule" and then select "Profiler" as the type, give it a name, and fill in the Rule values by picking from the list. If you haven't built your own custom Personalization ContentSpot and Rules ResourceManager classes using the WebSphere Portal Personalization APIs and documentation, then it's fairly simple to choose the built-in Browser Capability processor to build up a rule that you may use to customize portlets based on browser type.

3 As you can see in the screen shot below, I named my personalization rule "ProfileByBrowserType" and then created the rule (using input fields for WP Personalization Profile names and select lists for rule type and profiler rule options) that says if the BrowserType is Internet Explorer then the WP Personalization Profile is "ProprietaryDude" otherwise the WP Personalization Profile is "OpenDude". These determine the value returned from the personalization rule when it is run, based on which browser the user is using. When the WPF Personalization profile selection handler receives one of these values back from the execution of the rule, it then compares it against the external name associations specified for each profile in the profile set, until it finds a match.

4 In my example, I built a WPF model with the default Main and Page where I put a Text builder on the page and profile enabled the text value. The "Default" WPF Profile value for this builder input just says "Not personalized" and the following is what it looks like if you run this model as a standalone web application, or as a portlet with no custom profile selection enabled.

5 I then created two additional profiles, one called "Open" and one called "Proprietary" and gave them different values for the Text builder's value. Then I added external role associations for the profiles using the advanced section of the profile editor for each profile. I associated the "Open" WPF profile with the "OpenDude" external profile name, and I associated the "Proprietary" WPF profile with the "ProprietaryDude" external profile name (typed in via the "Add External" button in the WPF profile editor) as shown below.

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7 In the WPF profile set's "Selection Handler" tab, choose WP Personalization Profile Rule Selection Handler. You must manually edit the WP Personalization Rule name by hand in the profile selection handler's configuration XML ( <project>/webcontent/web-inf/config/selection_handlers/ wppznrolehandler.xml ), which is similar to how you would configure other WPF profile selection handlers. In this case, I set the rule name to match the rule I had created in the WP Personalization engine, so the handler would know which rule to programmatically invoke. <Handler name="wp Personalization Profile Rule Selection Handler"> <Description>Handler that maps users via WP Personalization Profile Rules.</Description> <Selection class="com.bowstreet.profiles.proxyprofileselectionhandler"> <Properties> <Property name="selectionclass">com.bowstreet.ibmportal.profiles.wppznroleprofile Selection</Property> <Property name="wp.pzn.rule.name">profilebybrowsertype </Property> </Properties> </Selection> </Handler> Note, if you have different customization requirements for different portlets or different profile sets used for a single portlet, which require using different personalization rules, then you may copy the profile selection handler configuration xml file, give it a new filename, handler name and rule name value and then use that new custom handler for those other profile sets. And finally, I deployed the portlet project to my portal where I had created the Personalization Profile Rule. Now when I view the portlet via Internet Explorer it looks like the following:

8 And when I view that portlet with Firefox I see the following: The above is just a simple example of how you may use the WPF personalization rule based profile selection handler, leveraging the WP Personalization Rules framework to customize a portlet. Obviously, determining browser type and displaying text based on that could be done by other more simple and lightweight mechanisms. The descriptions above were mainly intended to show the steps involved, to help you on your way to creating more complex personalization rules based customization. Additional Information WebSphere Portal InfoCenter Personalization cm_intr.html WebSphere Portlet Factory Wiki IBM Corporation All Rights Reserved. IBM, the IBM logo and WebSphere are trademarks of International Business Machines Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Internet Explorer is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Firefox is a registered trademark of the Mozilla Foundation. Other company, product, or service names may be trademarks or service marks of others. The contrived example used in this document was chosen to educate the reader on a series of steps used to set up customization based on personalization rules, and is not intended to imply a browser preference or any specific customization necessary to build a user interface for one browser versus another.