Ajax/JSON and LSDS/LSCS

Apologize about the vague subject line, but here's the problem statement.

I have a calendar component that allows end users to navigate months and shows events happening in that month. Our design is to run frontend AJAX LSCS queries and parse the JSON result.

The approach works well but we run into cross-domain issues between LSDS and LSCS. We experimented enabling CORS on our IIS7+Tomcat6 environments, but only Tomcat 7+ supports CORS.

Alternatively - we can build an AJAX component that will query LSCS and simply spit out the JSON result. This approach requires hardcoding/passing the componentID. We have upto 20 sites so this approach won't really work.

Link: /t5/LiveSite/ajax-vs-page/m-p/203703/highlight/true#M11409

How would you handle this?
Is there a way for a .page to output JSON? That may be easiest.

Environment: Livesite 7.3.2, on IIS 7 servers.

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Comments

Rajesh

1) Create a .page with a component which has an external which can accept parameters from the query (In case you need to pass any params).

2) In the component process all the lscs related queries and prepare a response, use the query data to query lscs if needed.

3) From you LSDS calendar page, call another LSDS page (.page) using ajax which you created in step1-2 and has a response ready.

4) Process the ajax response and display the result.

Thanks

Rajesh

nipper

We are using TC 8 with LSCS/LSCS 732 (running on the AWS Cloud).

No issues.

argh_teamsite

@Rajesh

The problem is between steps 2 & 3 you outlined.

I can call another .page for my ajax call, but I want JSON result (not xml). AFAIK, a .page cannot spit out JSON.

argh_teamsite

Hey Andy

Did you(or your team) do the upgrade to Tomcat 8? Or thats just how it was?

I am 3 weeks from testing, so trying to gauge effort.

Thanks!

Rajesh

From your external, you return the xml document.

In your .page, use xslt to generate the json data (wrapped in <html></html>).

When you use ajax and call your .page (which eventually returns you the page data).
Like your page is html page, so may be under a div you put all your json using xslt transformation.

<html>

json

</div>

</html>

Parse the data inside div and use it in your UI.

Thanks

Rajesh

argh_teamsite

Thanks Rajesh! Thats similar to our fallback option - An XML page with json content.

I am just hoping to deliver straight json content for frontend consumption.

Rajesh

Another workarround could be to write a jsp (running in your lsds app context) which just queries the lscs data and returns json data.

Make an ajax call to this jsp and get json data (very little code to write).

Better option is if you can upgrade your tomcat and query directly to lscs, it's just the backup.

Thanks

Rajesh

nipper

argh-teamsite wrote:
Hey Andy
Did you(or your team) do the upgrade to Tomcat 8? Or thats just how it was?
I am 3 weeks from testing, so trying to gauge effort.

Thanks!

We did a new install and pointed it to TC8.

Rick Poulin

argh-teamsite wrote:
AFAIK, a .page cannot spit out JSON.

Wrong. Your AjaxController can spit out whatever it wants, because it has full control over the HttpServletResponse object. Also you don't need to hardcode the component ID, you just have your component XSL print out the value to a Javascript variable and/or your object initialization.

<xsl:template match="/">

var ajaxUrl = "$AJAX_URL";

</script>

</xsl:template>