What does a component "know"?

When a component's XSL is being processed, what does it know about its environment? For example can it find out:
1) the "site"
2) the "url"
3) the Page Layout section (header, body, footer, ...)
4) ...

(and if so, how do I get it?)

As I continue on this I also need to know what environment I'm in (development, testing, production) since my external resources have different URLs depending upon which environment.

I would like to build a component that will be used on multiple sites, but it looks totally different based upon the site it's on. I would rather not have separate components, it would be nice if the people who build the pages can always use the same component regardless of where it's going to live.

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Comments

Rick Poulin

Build a page with a single component that only has the following as its Appearance XSL:

<xsl:template match="/" >
<xsl:copy-of select="/" >
</xsl:template>

That prints what your component "knows," i.e. the entire XML datasource provided to it. You can tack on additional OOTB externals and the like. Also know that externals and page controllers have access to a lot more information (e.g. the Java Request object) than your component XSL does. You can use a custom external/controller to add to the XML handed off to the component and then use that information for your visual transformation.

nipper

Anyone who could not figure out this simple mistake, really should not be using this component. But Rick did forget to close xsl:copy

Build a page with a single component that only has the following as its Appearance XSL:

<xsl:template match="/" >
<xsl:copy-of select="/" / >
</xsl:template>

That prints what your component "knows," i.e. the entire XML datasource provided to it. You can tack on additional OOTB externals and the like. Also know that externals and page controllers have access to a lot more information (e.g. the Java Request object) than your component XSL does. You can use a custom external/controller to add to the XML handed off to the component and then use that information for your visual transformation.

Bowker

Yea - I've already dumped that out. It's pretty much useless for what I'm looking for.

So basically the template doesn't know anything about it's environment such as which page-layout/Row/Column/Area. There aren't any parameters passed in to the template or anything?

I'm shocked. I didn't write the software, but I don't think it would have been too hard to pass that information in.

rpoulin - you mention adding externals/controllers. Can you point me to some documentation? Also will the same externals work with SitePublisher preview as well as LSDS/LSCS running on a production system?

Rick Poulin

Good catch nipper.

Look at the SPDev guide, chapter 6 -- Externals and Controllers.

Basically, you use the LiveSite build process (the UITK equivalent, but in livesite_customer_src) to integrate your custom code into livesite_customer.jar and/or add your own JARs into the build. Anything you build on the TeamSite end (for SitePub), you MUST copy to the Runtime and restart it, to make your classes available. After that, it's simply a matter of configuring your components to call them, via a special XML syntax that you add to your component content XML. The Java class is given the full context, which contains most of the information you're looking for I believe, and then can do whatever it wants with it. In the end, the class must return a snippet of XML, which is attached to the main XML datasource sent to your component.

In addition to the SPDev guide, you'll want to have a look at the livesite javadocs, which contains info about the RuntimeContext (the main thing you're given) and what information you can get from it: Interwoven/TeamSite/iwinstall/livesite/docs

tec_iwov

a static component can use tokens go get some of that data. you can use page scope tokents and back you component with an external to populate values in the page scope map on the request context.

or your external can generate custom xml that is consumed by your component stylesheet.