Forum OpenACS Development: Embedding xowiki portlets in different packages

Hi all.

We're trying to develop an OpenACS package and we would like to include in our pages certain "areas" that could be treated like xowiki pages (i.e. can be edited, revisioned and such).

The result would be something similar to what you get if you use {{adp portlets/wiki ... }} in a regular xowiki page, only that instead of being included that way, we would use an <include> element in the ADPs of our package.

Being rather new to the xotcl / xowiki scene I'm a bit lost. I have tried to simply include the wiki portlet but it will return an error stating that $__including_page has not been defined (which is true, of course).

In portlets/wiki.tcl (line 10) it is being used to generate the value for folder_id.

Does anybody have a suggestion on how to work around this problem or maybe about a different approach to including these wiki sections in our package?

Thanks.

Yes, something very similar to that.

There would be a few sections that look like regular content to users, but admins get an extra "edit" button that allows, well, edition (or the "view" button from the current portlet, both are reasonable options).

How did you implement that? Are you using Gustaf's portlet?

BTW, I had been playing with that desktop early this morning not knowing it was wiki content. It's great!

Just to add, you'll see that you'll need the item id to be able to fetch the content.

In index.tcl at the bottom, you will see some code that attempts to fetch a list of XoWiki pages from the xowiki instance mounted on a subsite.

Good Luck.

My apologies. There are a couple of things I need to update before I commit it to cvs head.

However, I have uploaded it to file storage below.

https://openacs.org/storage/view/ajaxhelper0.4d.tar.gz

Please be advised that ajax-portal is very much work in progress and isn't really ready for public consumption. It will take a bit to get it to work after installation.

If you encounter problems and you're stumped, let me know and I'll do my best to help.

Pablo,

i have not looked how hamiltons beautiful mashup works. but anyhow, there is quite a simple way to include xowiki pages in other applications.

The xowiki portlets/includelets works only for nesting xowiki pages, since they reuses the context of the including object, which you don't have in the general case. however, someone has commited a version of view.tcl/adp into xowiki/lib, which mostly works (see below).

Include in your own page the following code

array set node_info [site_node::get -url /xowiki]
set folder_id [::xowiki::Page require_folder \
		   -name xowiki -package_id $node_info(package_id)]
set item_id [::Generic::CrItem lookup -name "en:index" -parent_id $folder_id]
set page_title "Page including a wiki page"
set context ""

where "en:index" is the name of the page to lookup.
Add to your own adp file something like

<master>
  <property name="title">@page_title;noquote@</property>
  <property name="context">@context;noquote@</property>
<include src="/packages/xowiki/lib/view"
	 item_id="@item_id@"
	 folder_id="@folder_id@">

and change finally the the query parameter
in xowiki/lib/view.tcl to

{item_id:optional}

otherwise it will set always the specified item_id.
This is just a first shot. In the mid-term range,
the preferred interface would look most likely more like:

<include src="/packages/xowiki/lib/view"
	 instance="/xowiki"
	 name="en:index">

where one does not need to know folders etc. However, If you want to have edit links of these pages in your own package, you will however have to know the right item_id etc. and point the link to /xowiki/edit?item_id=$item_id, since edit depends as well on package_ids etc. It would be much nicer to make edit etc. methods in an oo sense of the pages, such that one does not have to deal with item and package ids like now.

This is just to warn you, that the interface with the IDs might change in the future. For now, please use the approach with the IDs like sketched above. I will commit an updated version of xowiki/lib/view.tcl when i have some more time to look more closely to it... i am not too happy about maintaining multiple versions of view.tcl, this should be somewhat refactored.

Following the suggestions received here we integrated the wiki into a custom package that we are working on so that blocks of text can be edited using xowiki (using adp includes).

Here is what we are trying to achieve:

1. Add edit buttons to the adp page that has the wiki includes that goes to the edit page. Ideally the edit page would show up in the URL space of the package itself and not within the xowiki url space (We have already achieved this following Gustaf's suggestion except for the URL space).

2. Pass a return URL to the xowiki edit page that we can use to bring us back to the page we were on before the edit.

For #2 Ham suggested we changed edit.tcl to add that param and modify the form when it is created like this:

set form_class [$object_type getFormClass]
$form_class create ::xowiki::f1 -volatile \
-data $page \
-folderspec $folderspec \
-submit_link $return_url

Unfortunately, it is not working. Even if we change the submit_link original definition in xowiki-form-procs.tcl, it always goes back to "view" after we edit.

Something is instructing it to do that and although it is probably obvious, we don't find it. Can any one help?

(commenting out line 160 didn't affect the behaviour, since we are dealing with plain pages)

The edit script is using ad_form and is called multiple times with different states. in order to provide e.g. the pretty name, one needs the page name, which is not available when one creates for example a new page. to make life easier for you, i have made a small change to edit.tcl and the form-procs to support the return_url. I have not tested intensively, but it seems to work.

as i wrote before, i hope to be able to come with a better approach in the not to distant future. Currently i am completely under water with a book project..

-gustaf

restarting the server is certainly reloading the files. the faster approach is to go to the package manager and press reload changed files, this is however just necessary, when files in /packagename/tcl/ are altered.

Just a quick note to let you know that I added your changes and it seems to be working perfectly. Thank you!

We will keep an eye on it and report any problems we find during testing.

--
Pablo.

see https://openacs.org/forums/message-view?message_id=584170 for using xowiki pages as dotlrn portal elements