Building iKnowBase Applications

This section describes briefly how you can build web applications using iKnowBase Content Services.

Key components

When you build applications, you typically expose a number of endpoints to the user:

• Pages that display information. These are typically implemented using Pages, Templates and various portlets.
• Pages that edits information. These are typically implemented using Pages, Templates and Forms.
• URLs that perform actions. These are typically implemented using Script Actions or PLSQL listeners.

Building Web Pages

Development of web pages using the iKnowBase Page and Template components together with iKnowBase Page Engine is based on the following patterns:

• Standalone pages
• Embedded pages
• Layout pages

Standalone Pages

Standalone pages are pages that contain all the required information to render a web page, within a single page definition. A standalone page is one page definition, one template, and one or more portlets, The templates can be developed by an HTML designer, while the actual page definition can be set up by a super user.

Perform the following steps to create a standalone page:

1. You create a Template, e.g. an HTML definition in which you define the layout of the page. The Template contains code that define the regions where you can place portlets (content components).
2. You create a Page, which you associate with the Template defined in the previous step.
3. Finally, you add portlets (menus, document lists, navigators, forms, etc) to be displayed in various regions on the page.

Standalone pages are simple to work with, but once you start building applications which require different layouts on different page, you often find yourself duplicating common elements such as headers, footers and menus. Therefore, standalone pages are generally best used during prototyping, and for pages with little or no layout and decorations.

Embedded pages

Pages can be re-used and embedded into other pages, including content and design. For example, you can create a page “my newsfeed” with multiple portlets, and then you can embed this page into both “front page” and “my page”.

Note that the output from the embedded page is included with all details into the embedding page. The embedded page should therefore not contain full html markup (such as the HTML and BODY tags), but only the actual information in a tag suitable for embedding (such as a DIV-tag).

Perform the following steps to embed pages:

1. Create a Template and a Page, and configure them to produce some sort of re-usable markup.
2. In the page where you want to embed the page, and use a PageRunner portlet to embed the content.

While embedding pages is a useful technique for structuring your page and portlet definitions, embedding by its very nature requires that the configuration is done on the outermost page. In some cases, it is possible that some parts of a collection of pages are common. For example, all pages in an application follow the same layout. They have a banner at the top, and a menu on the left. One possible solution is that every page includes a banner and a menu in the right place. The disadvantage arises in that moment it is determined to make changes to the main layout. It then becomes necessary to go into all the pages that are in use, and modify these. A better solution for this scenario is to build and use a layout page.

Layout Pages

Layout pages are useful in situations where you build many pages that you want to “surround” with the same information. For example, you often want all of your pages to use the same banner and footer. Using layout pages, you can create a layout page that contains the surrounding decorations, and then design individual pages that refer to the layout page for decorations.

Perform the following steps to create and use a layout page:

1. Create a Template and a Page for the layout page. Add content that belongs to the layout page (such as banner, footer and menus). In addition, add a Template placeholder where the actual page content will appear.
2. Create a Template and a Page for your actual application page. Add content that belongs to the page, such as the relevant Viewers and Forms. In addition, configure the Page to use the layout page defined in the previous step.

When the end user accesses the application page, the iKnowBase Page Engine will detect that it should be enclosed in the layout page, and produce the complete page based on both the layout and the regular page. The advantage of this solution is that individual pages do not know anything about the overall layout, while the layout page does not know which or how many pages are actually based on this. In this case, the subpage knows in which page it is included.

Example template for a layout page:

<!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC '-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Strict//EN' 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-strict.dtd'>
<html>
<head>
  <title>xNet layout page</title>
  <style type="text/css">
    div { border:thin solid black; padding:5px; margin:5px; }
  </style>
</head>
<body>
  <div id="banner">
    ${page.regions.banner}
  </div>
  <div id="leftmenu">
    ${page.regions.leftmenu}
  </div>
  <div id="content" style="float:right; width:75%">
    ${page.clientPage}
  </div>
</body>
</html>

Adding Content to Web Pages

After you have built a web page using the iKnowBase Page and Template components, you can start adding portlets (content components) to it. You generally need to create and configure iKnowBase components before you can add and configure iKnowBase portlets to your web page, as the portlets depends on these components. See iKnowBase Development Reference for further information about iKnowBase components and portlets.

Tooltip functions

A tooltip function is used in viewers where you want to have mouseover functionality on title attributes.
They can be useful in lists of documents to display additional informasjon about a document without navigating to detail pages.

Predefined tooltip functions

This is the list of tooltip functions available from a presentation style:

• Tooltip – cluetip – gist (used in search)
• Tooltip – cluetip – markup (used in search)
• Tooltip – cluetip – show preview page
• Tooltip – cluetip – snippets (used in search)
• Tooltip – cluetip – title/description

The three functions used in search will highlight the search criteria if entered by the user.

Define your own tooltip functions

To add new functions you can write your own PL/SQL-function, add it as a database command and use it in the presentation style layer. Use e.g the function ikb_tooltip.cluetip_preview as an example.

Cluetip is the framework for tooltip functionalities and there are two different implementation offered:

• ikb-cluetip-url will use another url to extract the content that will be displayed as tooltip. Make sure the url (if its a iKnowBase page) is defined with a package alias in iKnowBase Development Studio. To create a new function with this method, the tooltip function has to return something like this:

class="ikb-cluetip-url" title="<title>" rel="/somurl/<docIdParam><docid>"

• ikb-cluetip-title is the simple usage of cluetip and will display a title and a description as cluetip without running additional pages. To create a new function with this method, the tooltip function has to return something like this:

class="ikb-cluetip-title" title="<title>|<description>"

Executing business logic

While pages are excellent tools for building pages that display information, they are often not ideal for implementing business actions. iKnowBase provides a number of tools that are better for this explicit purpose.

Script Targets

Script Targets are a mechanism used to attach scripts directly to a URL, where the application developer is free to add business logic as needed. In many ways, Script Targets match servlets in usage scenarios.

Script Targets are typically implemented using the Groovy script language, with iKnowBase providing access to the database and the Service API.

Perform the following steps to create a Script Target:

1. Create a Template of types “Action” and “Groovy Script”. Add the business logic you want.
2. Create a Target. Refer to the Template you just created, and add a listen URL for the endpoint