Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 - (Page 63)

d09saund_p4ds 7/14/08 10:25 AM Page 63 Listing Six, you must define a named action and named parameter of the ActionRequest to which you attach your data as a named attribute. Within your .NET code, the data is applied to the attribute (Listing Eight). The target portlet reads the data back from the ActionRequest (Listing Nine). The sample application demonstrates how to write two portlets that cooperate. The first portlet provides a search text box and a submit button (Search.aspx). Once clicked, the portlet loads a new page (SearchResults.aspx) with a DataGrid displaying the result of the search. In a real-world application, this would probably involve a web service call or database look-up; however, for simplicity the sample code simply loads some XML from a file of test data. Initially, the second portlet is empty, but when the user selects a row in the DataGrid, a number of values from the selected row are broadcast via the property broker and displayed in the page LinkedData.aspx. If the second portlet interrogates another database using this data, you have a simple method of integrating two systems at the UI layer. Once the portlets are deployed, they must be “wired” up. This process is an administrative task that defines to the WebSphere property broker the particular output message that the source portlet data is to send to the target portlet. The wiring tool is described in the WebSphere Portal documentation. To run the sample, you need Visual Studio 2003 and a copy of Mainsoft for Java EE, Portal Edition (trial versions are available). The sample app (available online; see Resource Center,” page 5) includes a Visual Studio.NET Java EE Portal project consisting of two simple portlets demonstrating interportlet communication as described in this article. Listing Three ActionRequest ar = vmw.portlet.PortletUtils.getPortletRequest() as ActionRequest; RenderResponse rs = vmw.portlet.PortletUtils.getPortletResponse() as RenderResponse; Listing Four ActionRequest ar = vmw.portlet.PortletUtils.getPortletRequest() as ActionRequest; PortletPreferences prefs = ar.getPreferences(); prefs.setValue("userData", someData); prefs.store(); Listing Five RenderRequest rr = vmw.portlet.PortletUtils.getPortletRequest() as RenderRequest; PortletPreferences prefs = rr.getPreferences(); string userData = prefs.getValue("lastsearch", string.Empty); Listing Six WSRP An emerging standard for portlet development is Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP; www.oasis-open.org). WSRP defines a set of SOAP messages that contain portlet mark-up fragments. This means that the portlets themselves can be hosted on a remote machine to the portal server. The September 2008 l www.ddj.com l Dr. Dobb’s Journal 63 http://www.oasis-open.org http://www.ddj.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008 Contents Friday Night Fish Fry Alia Vox Developer Diaries Developer’s Notebook A Conversation With Erik Demaine Application Lifecycle Management Meets Model-Driven Development Building a Robust Development Environment Real Users Really Matter Matching Wildcards: An Algorithm The Android Mobile Phone Platform Managing Application Thread Use Signalling Integer Overflows in Java .NET Development & the IBM WebSphere Portal Server The Agile Edge Effective Concurrency Swaine’s Flames

Dr. Dobb's Journal - September 2008

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