Extending social lists using the digital data connector

The social rendering feature in IBM WebSphere Portal v8.5 is implemented as a IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for WebSphere Portal plug-in.

This approach makes it possible to use the extensibility features of this framework to extend the social rendering feature with extra capabilities:

• Realize custom queries against the IBM Connections server.

• Retrieve data from IBM Connections services other than the search service.

• Make it possible for portal site visitors to contribute social information through user interfaces that are generated by IBM Web Content Manager features.

• The social rendering Digital Data Connector plug-in
  To implement the IBM Connections data integration, the social rendering feature in IBM WebSphere Portal v8.5 uses a custom IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for WebSphere Portal plug-in.

• Implement custom IBM Connections queries
  IBM Connections provides a comprehensive remote API. Use this API to access social data through Atom feeds.

• Dynamic IBM Connections source URL construction
  To dynamically construct IBM Connections query URLs, use the [Plugin:ConnectionsContext] and [Plugin:ResourceURL].

• Organize the custom IBM Connections queries
  For the different query URLs to use, we can create multiple dynamic or static IBM Connections query URL components. For convenient use of these query URL components, we can create a generic authoring template for all list definitions to build from those queries.

Parent Social rendering

Related concepts:

IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for WebSphere Portal

Related information

The IBM Connections context rendering plug-in
Use the list-rendering cache