Interaction Management Guide

Creating a Content Selector

Content Selectors use rules to target specific groups of people with content items from BEA's Virtual Content Repository. Content Selectors return and display content. For example, if a user logs in and is identified in the User Profile as a book fan, a Content Selector can display a list of recommended books.

Developers can use Workshop for WebLogic to create and update Content Selectors and place them in a JSP. Portal administrators use the Administration Console to make changes to the Content Selectors that display content in your portal.

Users do not have to be authenticated (logged in) to be targeted by Content Selectors. For example, the presence of specific HTTP request or session properties, or specific date and time conditions can trigger content to be displayed. You can, for example, display targeted holiday content to users who visit your portal in the month of December and view your portal with a specific type of web browser.

However, authenticated users (as well as anonymous tracked users) have profile information associated with them that you can use to target them with personalized content. A book fan is an example of this type of User Profile data.

This chapter includes the following sections:

Setting Up Content to Display

Content Selectors retrieve content properties, which are usually text or numeric values. For example, you want your Content Selectors to retrieve information about books. Book content can be assigned many properties, such as title, author, publication date, ISBN, and a URL to the publisher's web site. You may want your Content Selector to display a bulleted list of titles and link each title to the publisher's web site. This list and link is accomplished through using just the text values of the content properties.

However, your book content could also have a binary property that stores an image of the book's cover. The Content Selector can also display that binary property—the actual image—using the ShowProperty servlet, as described in Creating a Placeholder File. The type of binary content that Content Selectors can display is dependent on the MIME types you have configured. By default, WebLogic Portal provides MIME support for displaying images and other types of files. See Displaying Additional MIME Types in a Placeholder for more information on other types.

This section includes the following topic:

Displaying Content for Other MIME Types

To display content for other MIME types, Content Selectors refer to a document's MIME type and then generate the HTML tags that a browser requires for the specific document type. For example, to display an image-type document, an ad Placeholder must generate the <img> tag that a browser requires for images. By default, ad Placeholders can generate the appropriate HTML only for the following MIME types:

If you are familiar with basic Java programming, you can write classes that enable Content Selectors to generate HTML for additional MIME types.

To support additional MIME types, you must complete the following tasks:

Creating and Compiling a Java Class to Generate HTML

To generate the HTML that the browser requires to display the MIME type, use Workshop for WebLogic to create a Java project in your application, and then create and compile a Java class in that Java project that implements the com.bea.p13n.ad.AdContentProvider interface. For information on this interface, see the Javadoc.

Registering the New Class

After you save the class in a directory that is in your CLASSPATH, you must notify WebLogic Portal Administration Console of its existence by performing the following steps:

Creating a Content Selector

Content Selectors are scoped to the enterprise application, so you can include a Content Selector in any JSP within the enterprise application.

A Content Selector consists of the following two parts:

Use the following guidelines when you create Content Selectors.

The <img> HTML tag's source path is constructed to use the path to the content item in the Virtual Content Repository. The path includes the ShowProperty servlet to render the binary file. In the node.getPath() method, node is a specific content item stored by the <utility:forEachInArray> tag's id attribute. If the <utility:forEachInArray> id attribute value was foo, the method would look similar to the following: foo.getPath().

This section contains the following topics:

Creating the Content Selector File

Perform the following steps to create a Content Selector file:

Figure 6-3 shows a Content Selector file called classic.sel. The condition that triggers the Content Selector is a user with a property set of SalesRegion with a value of Americas. The content that is retrieved is any content with a binary file name that contains IRACampaign.

Users do not have to be authenticated to be targeted by Content Selectors.

Building a Content Query with Expressions

You can use the WebLogic Portal Expression language in WebLogic Portal Administration Console to build content queries. You can build queries with the Advanced Query window from content-related JSP tags and when you are creating queries for Placeholders, Campaigns, and Content Selectors.

The query compares a content property to a value that you enter. A query contains the following three parts: <property><comparator><value>.

If the comparison is true, all matching content items are retrieved.

For example:

Queries are often made up of multiple clauses using and (&&) and or (||) logic. For example:

This section contains the following topics:

Using Rules to Build a Query

Use the following rules when you build a query:

Selecting Properties

The following two types of properties exist for content:

You can use both properties in a query.

User-defined content properties are stored in sets called types, which are defined in the WebLogic Portal Administration Console. For example, you can create a type called Book and add properties, such as title, author, pub_date, and isbn.

Explicit content properties are automatically associated with all content items and are automatically assigned values for a content item when the content item is added to the content repository. These properties, which are also listed in the com.bea.content.expression.Search class, include the items listed in Table 6-1.

When you construct a query, you can specify property names by themselves without quotes. For example: title <comparator> <value>. However, if a property name contains spaces, double quotes, or dashes, you must enclose the property name within a toProperty() format. For example: toProperty('Favorite Author') <comparator> <value>.

The query looks for the property name in all content types and returns any content item with that property value (if the content item meets the conditions of the query). However, you can also isolate a property within a specific type. For example, if you have a books type and an articles type that both contain a title property, you can retrieve content items with a specific title from within only the book type using the cm_objectClass property.

For example: title likeignorecase '*Adventure' && cm_objectClass = 'books'

Using Comparators

Comparators provide the logic that compares a query's property to the value you enter. If a content item meets the conditions of the query, the content item is returned. Table 6-2 contains a list of the comparators you can use in your queries.

Supplying Values

Values represent the content you want the query to return. By supplying values to a query, you are telling the query which content to retrieve or ignore based on the values stored on the content items.

For example, if you have a content type called book with a property called title, all content items you associate with the book type have a title field. Each title value is unique, so in a query, you can enter the unique value you want, resulting in the query retrieving a specific content item (or ignoring the content item, depending on the comparator you use).

You can enter values in two ways:

Creating Complex Queries

You can combine multiple independent query clauses, tying them together with and (&&) and or (||) logic and controlling the order of evaluation with parentheses the way you would with algebraic expressions. This lets you create more complex queries. You can also include not logic (!) in complex queries by using the exclamation point in front of a parenthetical grouping.

See the Content Management Guide for more information about queries.

Using Sample Queries

Figure 6-4 shows the properties set on a book stored in BEA's Virtual Content Repository.

The example queries in Table 6-3 use properties in the sample content item, and the description for each sample query tells you if the query will retrieve the content item.

Using a JSP Tag to Display a Content Selector File

After you have created a Content Selector file (see Creating the Content Selector File), you must use the <pz:contentSelector> JSP tag to display the content. The following JSP tag uses the classic Content Selector shown in Figure 6-3:

<pz:contentSelector rule="classic" id="nodes"/>

The JSP tag has two required attributes:

There are other attributes you can set on the <pz:contentSelector> tag. See the Javadoc for more information on the class.

Adding a Content Selector to a JSP

After you create a Content Selector file in Workshop for WebLogic, you can use any of the following three methods to add the Content Selector to a JSP in Workshop for WebLogic:

Dragging a Content Selector to a Portal File

Perform the following steps to drag a Content Selector to an open portal file:

Using More than One Content Selector

You can use multiple Content Selectors with conditional logic to get hierarchical personalized content, where you try to match the most specific to the least specific, or for mutually exclusive Content Selectors. Listing 6-2 demonstrates how to use multiple Content Selectors for personalized content.

<%@ taglib uri="content.tld" prefix="cm"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://www.bea.com/servers/p13n/tags/utility" prefix="utility"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://www.bea.com/servers/portal/tags/ad" prefix="ad"%>
<%@ taglib uri="http://www.bea.com/servers/portal/tags/personalization"
   prefix="pz"%>
<pz:contentSelector rule="FemaleContent" id="nodes" sortBy="cm_nodeName desc"/>
<% if (nodes == null || nodes.length <= 0) { %>
<pz:contentSelector rule="MaleContent" id="nodes" sortBy="cm_nodeName desc"/>
<% }%>
<% if (nodes == null || nodes.length <= 0) { %>
   Sorry, you don't get a free lunch today.
<% }%>
   Found <%=nodes.length%> Node(s):
<dl>
<utility:forEachInArray array="<%=nodes%>" id="node"
   type="com.bea.content.Node">
<dt><cm:getProperty id="node" name="title" conversionType="html"/></dt>
<dd><ad:render id="node" /></dd>
</utility:forEachInArray>
</dl>

Using the <pz:div> Tag Instead of a Content Selector

The <pz:div> JSP tag can provide in-line HTML Personalization. You can populate a JSP with sets of in-line content and wrap it with the tag. The tag uses a rule attribute that takes the name of an existing User Segment. Only members of that User Segment can see the in-line content. For example, you created a User Segment called bookfanUserSegment.seg in Workshop for WebLogic that makes anyone a member who has a bookfan User Profile property set value set of true. The following sample code illustrates this:

<pz:div rule="bookfanUserSegment">
   <p>Only users who are book nerds will see this text!</p>
</pz:div>

User Segment rules (conditions) are the same as those available to Content Selectors, so the <pz:div> tag provides a similar level of Personalization. The difference is that Content Selectors retrieve their content from the virtual content repository, while the <pz:div> tag encloses its content in-line in the JSP.

Deleting a Content Selector Query

Deleting a Content Selector query removes the query from the Content Selector in Workshop for WebLogic and the Administration Console.

Developers perform the following steps to remove a query in a Content Selector:

Deleting a Content Selector

Removing a Content Selector removes it from Workshop for WebLogic and from the Administration Console.

Perform the following steps to delete a Content Selector:

Modifying a Content Selector

You can use the following methods to edit the content that a Content Selector displays: