Smart UI Widget - Best Practice Suggestion (tabbed using category source vs query folder contents, e

We are building a knowledge base landing page (perspecive) using the smart UI widgets to underlying content that lives in Content Server (16.2).

We have a user requirement to have 4 tabs on a widget, with the underlying content on each tab for a specific set of documents. We have created a webreport that uses a "Content Server Category" as the datasource (from source tab) to gather the documents that correspond for each tab. However, we are wondering if performance wise if having each tab correspond to a content server folder (that has those documents as children - show children) would be better page performance than using the category data source on a webreport to gather the documents? I am looking for a practical suggestions here as this content is looked at all day by our Customer Service folks.

See attached example of widget.

One other major question: Are there other options using an OOTB widget to meeting this requirement i am not seeing?

1st tab example

3rd tab example

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Comments

Ian_Whitfield

Hi Pete,

It's difficult to say which option would be best performance without looking into the requirements and specific system in more detail. I don't think there would be much in it.

The best thing you could do to improve performance would be to switch from a tabbed interface to perhaps one that has a drop-down list and a search button. The dropdown list would have the categories users could select the category from. The search button would return the documents linked to the category or folder. That way you wouldn't load any of the WebReport data sources on page load which would be optimal, especially for the case where users are browsing to the landing page without using this particular widget. If this doesn't meet your requirement you should probably call the WebReports that get the data only when the additional tabs are clicked using ajax rather than loading all the data at start up. This will reduce the impact for the initial page load.

For code samples of how to do something like this see the following post;

https://knowledge.opentext.com/knowledge/cs.dll?func=ll&objId=68407131&objAction=viewincontainer&ShowReplyEntry=68378649#forum_topic_68378649

In terms of an out of the box widget to do this, the closest you could get would be a Custom View Search widget linked to the particular category or folder.

Regards
Ian

Olaf Schlachter

On a landing page I'd rather question the use of tabs from a design perspective.

How much information is each tab going to hold ?

Ferdinand Prantl

I am afraid, that if you want to implement the page exactly according to your specification, you will need to code it in JavaScript. Either as a WebReport, which is more difficult to maintain, if the page content gets complicated, or as a Smart UI extension, which allows maintaining a clear project structure, but is expensive for simple customization and means deploying a CS module. It is the similar approach, which you took in Classic UI.

OOTB solutions, which I can think of are based on the starting page, where you would somehow place a link to the next page, showing the document list.

You could use the Carousel widget to switches among configured widgets. But cycling NodesListReport widgets in the carousel will be probably inconvenient.
You could configure a starting page (perspective) with one or more Shortcuts widgets navigating to the four web reports.
You could create a facet using your category attribute and then four virtual folders using the four attribute values. No web report needed, you would use the core table browsing widget (nodestable). You would create a starting page to navigate to the four virtual folders like in the previous point.
You could use a Custom Search View widget on the starting page, as Ian suggested. It would open search results on a new page for the selected category attribute value.
You could create four URL objects pointing to the search results for the four category attribute values. Again, you would use the Shortcuts widget to place them on the starting page.
The tabbed perspective might look interesting at first, but it needs specific content. It needs a header widget with the concept of the overview tab and additional tabs. Also, it loads content of all tabs at the beginning.

The custom page could look like this:

The custom code will create the navigation bar and the content pane below it. Wnen a button is clicked, it will create a NodesListReport widget, show it in the content pane and load its data. When another button is clicked, if will create another NodesListReport widget and swap it with the existing one in the content pane. If a previous button is clicked again, it will swap the previous (cached) widget in the content pane. If you create four virtual folder, you will not need WebReports; you will use NodesTable widget.