Overview of the Portlets

 

This topic provides an overview of the Avitek Financial Sample Portal portlets, outlines the different visitor types, briefly discusses each portlet, and provides a description of portlet controls. This topic contains the following sections:

• Portlet Overview

• Visitor Types and Passwords

• Portlet Controls

 

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Portlet Overview

As previously mentioned, the Sample Portal contains a wide variety of portlets. Table 2-1 provides an overview of each portlet.

Table 2-1 Overview of the Sample Portal Portlets

Portlet	Description	Available To	Page
Quick Links	Provides useful links, such as login and logout, group membership, and update profile.	Everyone	Home
What's Hot	Displays the number of times each company in the Company Profiles portlet is clicked. You can also display this portal's content in an Excel spreadsheet.	Visitors 1-10	Home
Company Profiles	Displays an HTML document showing company information using a content selector.	Visitors 1-10	Home
My Work	Provides a To Do list for personal activities.	Visitors 1-10	Home
Team Work	Provides a To Do list for a group.	Visitors 1-10	Home
Portfolio	Displays selected stock symbols, number of shares, and value. Also provides the ability to trade stock.	Visitors 1-10	Home
Newsletters	Displays newsletters to an investor visitor. The particular newsletters a visitor sees matches that visitor's user profile. The newsletters are written by the visitor's financial advisor.	Visitors 4-7	Home
MyNewsletters	Displays newsletters and their approval status. You can also author newsletters in this portlet.	Visitors 2- 3	Home
Review Newsletters	Displays the newsletters written by the financial advisors for approval, rejection, or removal.	Visitor 1	Home
Customer Service	Provides a means for entering a customer service request.This portlet demonstrates integration with the JCA sample database adaptor provided with Weblogic Server 6.1.	Visitors 1-10	Home
Customer Service (Service Representative View)	Displays all service requests to the Customer Service Representative.	Visitor 5	Home
Email	Displays the contents of a visitor's e-mail inbox.	Visitors 1-10	Home
World News	Connects to external sites that provide RSS (Rich Site Summary) information, retrieves news topics based on visitor preference, and displays them as clickable links.	Visitors 1-10	Web
Dictionary	Looks up the definition of a word by connecting to Merriam-Webster Web site.	Everyone	Web
Quote	Provides a stock information from Yahoo Finance.	Everyone	Web
Web Search	Web search through Yahoo, Excite, or Lycos.	Everyone	Web
Bookmarks	Provides the ability to create and maintain a list of Web site links.	Visitors 1-10	Web

 

 

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Visitor Types and Passwords

The Sample Portal has ten predefined visitors (visitor1, visitor2 ... visitor10). All predefined visitors use the same password, which is "password" and is case sensitive. Every visitor belongs to a group and a role. The portlets displayed to a particular visitor depend on that visitor's group membership and role. Each group and role has different privileges. To see the functionality of the various portlets, you need to switch visitor types.

The following list describes each group and role:

• Everyone Group, Guest Role—The portlets displayed to everyone regardless of group membership and role.

• Avitek Group—The portlets displayed to visitors that belong to the Avitek group. Visitor 1-10 all belong the Avitek group. This group has the following roles:

  • Approver Role—Provides the ability to reject, approve, or delete newsletters written by financial advisors.

  • Financial Advisor Role—Provides the ability to write newsletters.

  • Investor Role—Provides the ability to read newsletters written by a particular financial advisor.

  • Guest Role—Provides the ability to view and use all portlets except the Newsletter portlets.

    Table 2-2 Visitor, Group, and Role Associations

    Visitor	Group	Role	Password (case sensitive)
    Everyone	Everyone	Guest	None
    Visitor 1	Avitek	Approver	password
    Visitor 2	Avitek	Financial Advisor	password
    Visitor 3	Avitek	Financial Advisor	password
    Visitor 4	Avitek	Investor	password
    Visitor 5	Avitek	Investor	password
    Visitor 6	Avitek	Investor	password
    Visitor 7	Avitek	Investor	password
    Visitor 8	Avitek	Guest	password
    Visitor 9	Avitek	Guest	password
    Visitor 10	Avitek	Guest	password

    
     

 

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Portlet Controls

Portlet controls allow you to use portlets. For example, a portlet may have more than one view; it may be maximized, minimized, or detached from the portal. Portlet views are implemented using JavaServer Pages (JSP). They range in complexity from containing simple static HTML content to employing JSP tag libraries or JSP scriptlets that access EJB components or other application functionality within the application server. The controls for portlets in the Sample Portal are listed in Table 2-3.

Table 2-3 Portlet Controls

Button	Name	Description
	Help	Opens a Help window.
	Maximize	Maximizes the Portlet to the full size of the browser window.
	Unmaximize	Returns a maximized portlet to its original size.
	Edit	Opens the portlet for editing.
	Finished	Closes the portlet from editing.
	Float	Opens the Portlet in a separate browser window.
	Minimize	Minimizes the portlet so that only the Title is displayed.
	Restore	Returns the minimized portlet to its original size.