personalize site w user segments

we want to use user segments in vap 7.4 to change the sites appearance and/or content based on users' attributes pulled via LDAP. i see some custom display tags, etc .. in the dev guide and mention also of using CAM .. but we use DPM.

anyone know if its possible to switch styles or portlet chromes or anything based on segments ... and/or possibly use DPM queries (with jsp overrides) to pull specific content for user with certain attribute (eg. user is from north america so he gets a particular map).

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Al_Daniel

Hello Bob,

You can control which segments a user belongs to based on LDAP attributes. Start by adding custom user properties to make the LDAP attributes available to Portal. This is outlined in the Configuration Gude (page 45, Adding Custom LDAP Properties). The properties will then be available for use when configuring segmentation conditions.

Once you have defined the segments, then determine if a particular user belongs to a specific segment using published Portal API. See the Developer's Guide , section 'Working with User Segments' on page 265.

     com.epicentric.segment          taglib:              <%@ taglib uri="vgn-tags" prefix="vgn-portal" %>                            ...              <vgn-portal:insegment friendlyid="friendlyID">                     <!-- do something -->               </vgn-portal:insegment>          jsp:                <%@ page import="com.epicentric.user.*,                com.epicentric.segment.*"                contentType="text/html; charset=UTF-8"                %>                ...                                SegmentManager sm = SegmentManager.getInstance();                Segment segment = sm.getSegmentByFriendlyID(friendlyID);                if (segment.contains(user)) {                     //do something                }

Add this type of logic to your style and secondary page components to change the sites appearance and behavior. You can also develop custom components that use this logic to initiate and control cross-context calls to DPM.

I do not believe you can use this API from (Content Portlet) jsp overrides because they run inside the Dynamic Portal Module application context.

Kind Regards
Alex

Al_Daniel

Hello Bob,

I found this in the Admin and Dev guides.

        The classification of users into user segments (based on user properties) is
        used only for portlets where you can set content-selection rules that work with
      user segments to determine what to display to the end-user. Conditions in the
      user segments are not evaluated until the portlet main view renders. At that
        time, the user’s properties are evaluated against the segments and, if a match is
        found, the user is added to that user segment.

There is a similar statement in the API.

Although this package is part of a general-purpose segmentation API, currenty it is used
only for segmenting users to support personalization of portal content.

Based on the docs, it appears that the segmentation feature is intended to only be used for personalizing CAM content displayed in portlets. As a general-purpose API it does work as expected in Grids, Secondary Pages, and JSP Include Pages. I verified this by adding segmentation logic to several different non-portlet components and it worked without issue.

You can use the API in the way you described - in the technical sence that the API itself does not have any dependencies on CAM. That said, one interpretation of the documentation is that using it outside of a CAM content portlet is prohibited. Note that the documentation states that "is used only" instead of "can only be used", and might simply reflect the fact that segmentation API is currently only used by the Portal application itself for that purpose.

Per my previous post, you can integrate custom LDAP attributes into Portal following the instructions outlined in the Admin guide. Instead of using Segmentation API, you could always use com.vepicentric.user.User.getProperty(String propertyID) directly to check for the presense and value of specific custom attributes for the user. The Segmentation feature is based on the underlying User API, but allows you to define and configure the conditions from the Server Console instead of writting the logic yourself in a .class or .jsp.

Kind Regards
Alex

Bob_Ward

Thanks for the posts .. we are currently evaluating a couple of different approaches and this certainly helps. We will be creating custom/personal pages for our top customers and key off the LDAP attributes like its described.