Forum .LRN Q&A: Wiki - Access Portlets

Posted by Christian Fuchs on 05/17/08 09:53 AM

How would I be able to access the contents of portlets in a wiki - page.

For example: For a public information terminal I would like to gather information from openacs/dotlrn to display it on an unattended information terminal.
This way I could show "News", "Calendar" and so on in a different format.
Maybe more flexible, how would I read ie. the news of community x in a wiki page?
Or read all entries of a specific calendar and display it on a wiki page?

Is this possible?
Last question: How would I display parts of a webpage in a wiki page? ie. with an iframe

2: Re: Wiki - Access Portlets (response to 1)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 05/18/08 10:38 PM

By "portlets", i assume, you are referring to dotlrn-portlets. There is little support for this since a while in xowiki (http://alice.wu-wien.ac.at:8000/xowiki-doc/#adp-includes; here, little adapter scripts provide the needed setup for the dotrln-portlets).

There is much better support for xowiki in the forthcoming xoportal, as presented at the Guatemala conference. The whole presentation is with audio+slides is on the server in guatemala, the slides are e.g. on
http://alice.wu-wien.ac.at:8000/s5-xowiki-talk-guatemala/download/file/developing-oo-1.pdf

See slide 28 and 29 for using dotlrn-portlets in different contexts.

Can you elaborate more about your last question? One can certainly provide an includelet for xowiki that is using an iframe to show other content (e.g. google). Not sure, what you refer to by "parts"...

best regards
-gustaf neumann

3: Re: Wiki - Access Portlets (response to 2)

Posted by Christian Fuchs on 05/19/08 08:33 PM

Thanks I answered the last question by myself by doing a little "trial and error playing around" with xowiki-plainpages and iframe-TAG.

Using ADP-Pages in xowiki, like you stated in your first paragraph.
Do I understand the syntax correctly that one can show ANY ADP-Page from xowiki.

So, the ADP-Page /dotlrn/classes/kfm/bhak_eisenstadt.0AK_ENWS_F.s0708/calendar/view?list_of_calendar_ids=6197699&period_days=100&view=list

should be accessed by xowiki-adp-includelets with:
{{adp /packages/calendar/www/view-list-display {list_of_calendar_ids 6197699 view list period_days 100 base_url /dotlrn/calendar/} }}

In my case it does not show the appropriate calender items?

Even it I use
{{adp /packages/calendar/www/mini-calendar {view day base_url /dotlrn/calendar/} }},
it shows a calendar in monthly view with no lines (css) in place.
What am I doing wrong?

4: Re: Wiki - Access Portlets (response to 3)

Posted by Gustaf Neumann on 05/20/08 10:40 AM

Dear Christian,

The {{adp ....}} interface allows to call every .adp/.tcl pair. But it does not guarantee, that this .adp/.tcl pair will work.

Many adp files are written in a way that they assume that (a) a certain list of tcl variables are set, and (b) they are called from a certain place. For example, if the .tcl file calls "give me the current community", and the package is not mounted under a community, it will fail.

In order to figure out, what adp chunks can be included, one can
a) try,
b) read the code, or
c) use the provided interfaces from the PACKAGENAME/lib directory of the packages (.tcl/.adp-pairs written for inclusion in different packages).