A slot is a Nucleus component that you can use, in conjunction with scenarios, to set up and display a series of personalized content items on one or more Web pages. Slots are containers that you use to display and manage dynamic items on your Web site. You use targeting servlet beans to include slots in site pages, and you use scenarios to fill them with content.
Slots provide some powerful features not available through targeters:
Slots can be integrated with scenarios, providing more flexibility and control over delivery of dynamic content. With scenarios, you can set up an empty slot that generates its own request for content when a site visitor displays the page.
Slots can display content other than repository items.
Slots have better caching capabilities than targeters, facilitating faster display.
You typically create a slot in the ATG Control Center, as described in the UsingSlots chapter in the ATG Personalization Programming Guide. After you create the slot, you integrate the slot into your application as follows:
Add the slot to the JSP through the appropriate targeting servlet bean—for example,
TargetingForEach.Create a scenario for the slot that specifies the content to display in the slot and the circumstances when it appears.
Create a scenario for the slot
A scenario can perform these tasks:
Defines the events and circumstances that cause content to appear in the slot.
Specifies the content that appears.
Note: Instead of using a scenario to determine slot content, you can use an existing content targeter.
For example, you might want to display a series of messages—a Welcome Back message and a list of new pages—to site members who log on to your site after an absence of eight or more weeks. To do so, you create a WelcomeBack slot and a scenario that performs these tasks:
Tests whether eight weeks elapsed since a user’s last login.
If the first condition evaluates to true, displays the appropriate items in the
WelcomeBackslot.
Note: A slot can contain only items of the same type from a single repository. (The content item type is a setting that your database administrator or application developer defines when he or she sets up a repository. For more information, see the ATG Repository Guide.) The item type that you can include in a particular slot is specified by the itemDescriptorName property in the slot component. The repository is specified by the repositoryName property in the slot component.
You use the Control Center to create and enable scenarios for slots. For more information, see the ATG Personalization Guide for Business Users.
