Livesite component displaying content dynamically from DCR

Srini_lnt

Have a component which allows users to choose a dcr and the part of the DCR contents are displayed and read more link is created.

On click of the read more , page 2 is loaded where the content of the DCR is shown.

Option 1)
step1: create page 1 and include a component that allows me to select DCR and transforms the DCR and dispaly text and read more link
Step2: Create page 2 and include a component, select the same DCR that will display complete list of DCR's.

But this forces users to duplicate the effort of referencing the DCR in two pages.

OPtion2)
step1: create page 1 and include a component that allows me to select DCR and transforms the DCR and dispaly text and read more link.

On click of read more link, is there a way i can pass the DCR path to page 2, component which will then dispaly the content of the DCR in page 2.

shanon

>On click of read more link, is there a way i can pass the DCR path to page 2, component which will then dispaly the content of the DCR in page 2.

Yes, you can do this with External objects... there are many ways to do it, but the simplest ( and least secure ) is to pass the wa-relative vpath as a query-string paramter to page 2.

So the link would look something like this in your XSL:

$PAGE_LINK[Page2]?&dcrPath=templatedata/Category/Type/data/foo.xml

Basically you want to create an external object that looks for this dcrPath parameter and then reads that DCR from the filesystem and returns it in the external's result document.

First get the parameter ( you'll probably want more error checking in here but this should give you the idea )...

Note that I use a Log object mLogger... this is using Jakarta Commons Logging which is already included with TeamSite. You may have to add the appropriate jars from IWHOME/httpd/webapps/content_center/WEB-INF/lib to your classpath while compiling, but I highly recommend logging verbosely.

public Document execute(String pMethod, Hashtable pParams) throws ExternalException
  {
    Document doc = null;

    if( pMethod.equalsIgnoreCase("readDCR")
    {
        String dcrPath = (String)pParams.get("dcrPath");
        if( dcrPath != null && !"".equals(dcrPath.trim())
        {
           // creates  document.
           doc = getEmptyExternalDoc();
           Element rootnode = doc.getDocumentElement();

           // read the dcr
           Document dcrDoc = readXMLFile(dcrPath);

           // import the dcr nodes into the external doc
           // the 2nd parameter is a "deep" import which we want.
           doc.importNode(dcrDoc.getDocumentElement(),true);

           // append the DCR's DOM as a child of the 
           // node.
           rootnode.appendChild(dcrDoc.getDocumentElement());
        }
        else
        {
           // error check.
        }
    }
    else
    {
      throw new ExternalException("Invalid method [" + pMethod + "]!");
    }
    return doc;
  }

Here's a method that takes a relativepath and reads the an XML file into a DOM.

/**
   * Reads an XML file from the file-system and returns a valid org.w3c.Document.
   * @param pRelativePath The relative-path to the XML file.
   * @return A valid Document, or null if there's an error/file is missing/etc.
   */
  public Document readXMLFile(String pRelativePath)
  {
    DOMWrapper dom = null;

    EndUserSite site = getSite();
    FileDALIfc fileDAL = getUser().getFileDAL();

    String dcrPath = fileDAL.getWebRoot(site) + pRelativePath;
    try
    {
      String dcrXML = fileDAL.read(dcrPath);
      if( dcrXML != null && !"".equals(dcrXML.trim()) )
      {
        dom = new DOMWrapper(dcrXML);
      }
    }
    catch(SAXException se)
    {
      if( mLogger.isErrorEnabled() )
      {
        mLogger.error("fetchDCRXML: could not parse FormEntry XML!",se);
      }
    }
    catch(RuntimeException re)
    {
      if( mLogger.isErrorEnabled() )
      {
        mLogger.error("fetchDCRXML: could not read FormEntry: " + dcrPath,re);
      }
    }
    return dom == null ? null : dom.getDocument();
  }

HTH,
Shanon