Reusing registered iWidgets
When you register an iWidget in the portal, a copy or clone of the IWidgetWrapper portlet is created to map the iWidget model to the portal model. The new portlet carries the title and the description as defined in the iWidget definition: this way you can locate and manage it as other portlets in the portal.
While this mechanism allows for the most common use cases, you can also reuse and customize registered iWidgets.
Example: An iWidget that gives information about the weather in a specific city is registered once in the portal, but you want to place it on different portal pages to show the weather for different cities. You can achieve different behaviors for the iWidget instances by one of these two ways:
- Overwrite the corresponding iWidget attributes in the iWidget microformat used to include the iWidget in the portal page. In this example overwrite the area code for the city for which you want to show the weather.
- Copy the portlet that wraps the iWidget and customize the corresponding iWidget attributes of this copy by editing the related portlet preferences. This option allows you not only to reuse a registered iWidget, but also to preconfigure it and the related portlet, regardless of whether it is currently integrated into a portal page or not. Moreover, iWidget attributes are handled differently from other aspects of iWidget definitions during updates of the iWidget definition so that such customization is retained across refresh operations.
Parent
Use widgets
How iWidgets are represented in the portal model
Related tasks
Register iWidgets for use with the Page Builder theme
Customize iWidget attributes
Manage portlets
Copy a portlet
Update iWidget attributes when refreshing iWidget definitions