WebSphere

 

Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows

 

Cooperative portlets

The term cooperative portlets refers to the capability of portlets on a page to interact with each other by sharing information. One or more cooperative portlets on a portal page can automatically react to changes from a source portlet triggered by an action or event in the source portlet. Portlets that are targets of the event can react so that users are not required to make repetitive changes or actions in other portlets on the page. This provides a coordinated and consistent behavior between the portlets on the page and enhances users' overall experience. Cooperation between source and target portlets is facilitated by a WebSphere Portal Express runtime entity called the property broker. Portlets on a page can cooperate in this way even if they were developed independently, without the programmer's awareness of the existence of the other cooperative portlets.

In this documentation, interface names such as PropertyBrokerService or method names such as activateAction are used without mentioning the package name or specific method signature. The package name and specific method signature are different for the standard and IBM APIs, and omitting these implies that the reference applies to both. Few non-standard extensions are required to support portlet cooperation for standard portlets. As much as possible, the standard interfaces and objects (such as processAction, Portlet/ActionRequest etc) are reused for the portlet cooperation support.

WebSphere Portal Express supports cross-page portlet communication for cooperative portlets, allowing portlets on different pages to communicate. See Wiring cooperative portlets for information on required administrative setup. In addition, portlets using Struts or JavaServer Faces, as well as portlets using the standard portlet APIs, can use the cooperative portlets features. SeeStruts integration with cooperative portlets for details, including exceptions. For more information on Rational Application Developer using JavaServer Faces see the Creating Faces portlets and projects section in Rational Application Developer documentation.

The following topics describe portlet cooperation in WebSphere Portal Express:

These topics are illustrated with samples that are provided by WebSphere Portal Express. See Cooperative portlets for more information.

 

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