PageBuilder2 theme architecture - Dynamic Content Spot

In the PageBuilder2 theme architecture - theme.html i mentioned that the theme.html makes use of concept of dynamic content spot. The basic concept is that the theme.html want to include .jsp page, since the .html page cannot directly add .jsp page since .jsp pages need servlet context to compile and execute, those .jsps are packaged in the PageBuilder2.war along with Default.jsp.



Ex. the theme.html wants to forward control to asa.jsp for generating active sight analytics(asa) related markup, so you can include that .jsp in the theme.html like this

<a rel="dynamic-content" 
   href="res:/PageBuilder2/themes/html/PageBuilder2.0/asa.jsp"></a>

But this approach has following problems

• Reference by name abstracts the dynamic content away from the implementation. This is necessary if the theme needs to run on multiple runtimes, for example WebSphere Portal and IBM® Mashup Center. The portal implementation of the navigation tabs can be a JSP that contains portal specific code. The Mashup Center on the other hand cannot execute portal JSP code, but provides an iWidget instead.


• Reference by name isolates the theme author from having to know the underlying code information. This is useful if the theme author is an HTML and CSS designer, but not a J2EE or JavaScript developer. The HTML and CSS developer needs to know only the list of named content spots and the simple syntax to add it. This developer can then write code without having to know JSP path names etc.

So in order to provide one more layer of indirection, WPS has WP_DynamicContentSpotMappings resource provider that lets you map a symbolic name to the location of .jsp like this




Now inside your theme.html you can refer to the asa.jsp like this

<a rel="dynamic-content" href="dyn-cs:id:asa@tl:oid:csa2.theme" />


The resolver framework takes care of finding the actual .jsp file from this symbolic name. Also if you start digging into the .jsp files you will notice that they also include other .jsps by using this type of syntax


<r:dataSource uri="dyn-cs:id:configGlobal@tl:oid:csa2.theme" escape="none">
<r:param name="pragma" value="cache"/>
</r:dataSource>
<r:dataSource uri="dyn-cs:id:configDynamic@tl:oid:csa2.theme" escape="none"/>