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Live text for click-to-action


IBM WebSphere Portal supports a live text API for user controlled data transfer between components. With live text, a component on a page can declare sources and targets for data transfer.

For example, this can be a portlet or a navigation element. When the user clicks on a source element, the portal displays a menu listing targeto that match the selected source. When a menu item is selected, the portal invokes the corresponding target passing it the source data. This process is called Click-to-Action (C2A).

Both sources and targets are specified by HTML markup that apply live text elements. This means that the HTML markup contains special attributes that marks the HTML fragment as a click-to-action tag.

As both sources and targets are defined by live text elements, all components that contribute HTML markup to a page can provide sources and targets. This includes IBM portlets, JSR standard portlets, and theme and skin components, as well as WCM content or Web clippings. Portlets can register their portlet action or render URLs as server-side targets, but we can also define targets within one portal page that point to another page or even to a Common Gateway Interface (CGI) handler outside the portal.

Click-to-action treats all source data as unstructured text. We can encode any information in the source value, but the target handler is responsible for decoding the received data appropriately.

Click-to-action also integrates with the server side portlet communication programming model: If a portlet provides the following server side communication targets, they will automatically be made available for click-to-action on all pages containing the portlet:

Therefore portlets that use these declarations do not need to generate semantic tagging markup for click-to-action targets.

Administrators can turn off the automatic generation of click-to-action targets by specifying a portlet preference com.ibm.portal.c2a.target.generation = false.


Parent: Web 2.0 user interface features