How the PAF Processes Page Requests

The following is an overview description of the way in which the PAF handles page requests.

  1. The user requests a portal page in the portal context path.

  2. The request is processed by the Portal Filter Chain, elements of which set portal request attributes, including the PORTAL, COMMUNITY, PAGE, DISPLAYMODE, and DEVICE.

  3. The PageTemplateDispatchServlet determines which page to forward the request to by examining the portal request attributes. If the URL specifies the page parameters, then the page is routed directly to that page; otherwise, the community’s default page is used.

  4. The .jsp page or Servlet associated with the requesting output device, gear mode, and display mode is processed. (This involves examining the context parameters for the request.)

  5. The layout is rendered in the page template.

  6. When the PAF encounters a region definition within the layout template of the resulting page, it retrieves the gears that should be rendered.

  7. The content of each gear is determined by the gear renderer tags, which take input values for such parameters as community, page, region, profile, locale, gear, etc. These tags are described in the remainder of this chapter.

  8. The gears and their content are rendered in the appropriate layout template for the requested output device.