Navigational State SPI

 

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Navigational state represents the view of the portal that is associated with a particular client. The client can request (query) different views by interacting with the web page, for example by navigating to a new page. This interaction does not change the state on the server but requests a new view from the server. It is therefore safe operation in terms of HTTP 1.1 (See RFC 2616, Section 9.1.1). This allows the client to navigate back and forward through its recent views, bookmark views, and go back to them by invoking a browser bookmark. This behavior is achieved by encoding the navigational state of IBM WebSphere Portal into the URL. Different navigational states result in different URLs.

For details on the back button behavior and the support of bookmarks, refer to the Portal navigation and browser Back button behavior section. This section introduces the Navigational State SPI, in particular how the SPI is used in order to create URLs carrying navigational state. The SPI offers two services (obtainable via JNDI) to create such URLs:

  • The Portal State Manager Service is a portal service, which is used to realize use cases that go beyond what the portal tags provide. In particular, it can be used to create URLs within portal artifacts such as themes and skins (for example in custom JSP tags) as well as in artifacts that are removed from the request processing (for example Enterprise JavaBeans). However, it is not meant for portlets.

  • The Portlet State Manager Service is the counterpart service supporting JSR168 portlets. Accordingly, use the Portlet State Manager Service to create URLs within portlets that cannot be created using the JSR 168 Portlet API only.

The com.ibm.portal.state package is the main package of the Navigational State SPI holding the service interfaces as well as the interfaces making up the navigational state object model. For more information about all SPI interfaces, refer to the Javadoc.

 

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