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HCL Digital Experience Product Documentation
Welcome to the product documentation for HCL Digital Experience. Find information about how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend solutions.
HCL Digital Experience 8.5
Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 8.5 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
Developing
This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal
You can use the Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal framework to integrate data from external data sources on your portal pages by using HCL Web Content Manager presentation components. External data means that the data does not need to be stored directly in HCL Web Content Manager. For example, you can use DDC to render social data that you have on your HCL Connections server or on other social platforms in the context of your portal pages. Other possible data sources include news feeds, task lists, product catalog information, to name just a few.
Creating and deploying custom Digital Data Connector plug-ins
You can deploy custom Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal plug-ins as plug-ins into the HCL Portal application extension registry.

HCL Digital Experience Product Documentation
Welcome to the product documentation for HCL Digital Experience. Find information about how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend solutions.
- HCL Digital Experience 9.5
- HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy Content]
- HCL Digital Experience 9.0
  Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 9.0 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
- HCL Digital Experience 8.5
  Learn how to install, configure, troubleshoot, maintain, and use Version 8.5 of HCL Web Content Manager and HCL Portal Server, Enable, and Extend.
  - Overview
    HCL Digital Experience (formerly IBM WebSphere Portal and IBM Web Content Manager) empowers you to create, manage, and deliver engaging omnichannel digital experiences to virtually all audiences with responsive content, targeted offers, seamlessly integrated applications, and consistent branding across channels (web, mobile. and hybrid mobile/web applications and more).
  - Roadmaps to deploy your system
    Review the roadmaps to understand the common deployment, configuration, migration, and integration patterns.
  - Roadmaps to create your website
    Review the roadmaps to understand how to create your website.
  - Online Help
    This Online Help is made available in the HCL Digital Experience Help Center for quick references on how to install, configure, maintain, and use HCL Digital Experience.
  - Installing
    HCL Digital Experience provides flexible deployment options that range from proof-of-concept where you can examine and test functionality to a highly available and scalable production environment. Review the planning information to learn more about hardware and software requirements, high availability, scalability, supported topologies, and much more. Select your operating system and then select the installation pattern that most reflects your business needs.
  - Configuring
    Run the following tasks after you install and deploy HCL Digital Experience. They address tasks that are typically run one time and have a global effect. Some configuration changes are made more frequently or do not have a global effect. These tasks are addressed in the Administering section.
  - Backup and restore
    Backup and recovery of data files and databases is an essential operation for any business system, particularly for data and applications that run in production environments. Create and follow a plan for backing up and recovering data on all tiers of your HCL Digital Experience deployment. IBM Installation Manager must also be included in backup and recovery planning. If you back up the HCL Portal file structure and then install a fix pack, your HCL Digital Experience and IBM Installation Manager become out of sync after you restore the HCL Portal file system. This condition is not recoverable.
  - Migrating
    Successful migration requires significant planning and preparation, understanding the tools that are involved, and careful execution of the appropriate steps in the order provided.
  - Integrating
    Integrate HCL Digital Experience with software such as HCL Sametime to enable your users to collaborate more easily. You can also use the unified task list portlet to integrate HCL with your backend business process software, such as IBM Process Server.
  - Administering
    Use the administration tools that are provided with the portal to do various day-to-day administration tasks. There are two methods for editing portal setup: using the administration portlets or the XML configuration interface. The administration portlets are a convenient way to make real-time updates to the portal's configuration. While the XML configuration interface is suited to more advanced administration, including batch processing of updates.
  - Securing
    Security tasks include setting up property extension databases and custom user repositories, configuring and activating SSL, and configuring authentication. In addition, tasks such as activating Federal Information Processing Standards (FIPS) and NIST SP800-131a security modules and configuring external security managers such as Security Access Manager might be required to secure your portal environment.
  - Monitoring
    HCL Portal includes tools and features to help you monitor the portal site.
  - Setting up a website
    Setting up a website includes, creating pages, adding navigation, setting up search, and adding content to the site. Themes are used to customize the portal's look-and-feel. Out-of-the-box templates and the site wizard can help you set up your portal site faster. You can add wikis and blogs to your site and let users tag and rate content on your site.
  - Staging to production
    During portal solution development, the solution is initially developed, tested, and refined on one server or a limited number of servers. The solution is deployed later on live systems, referred to as the production environment. The process of moving the solution from the development environment to the production environment is called staging.
  - Developing
    This section includes developer documentation on extending applications and development assets for HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager.
    - Changing to a developer mode environment
      Install HCL Digital Experience and then immediately change to a developer mode environment. Use this environment when you develop applications, themes, portals, and portlets. Startup performance is improved within a developer mode environment.
    - Dojo and HCL Digital Experience
      HCL Digital Experience contains an instance of the Dojo Toolkit, a JavaScript library that is based on the Dojo Toolkit. When you develop components that use Dojo, you must be aware of how the portal uses Dojo, and the tips and restrictions when you use Dojo.
    - Extending HCL Portal class path
    - Developing themes and skins
      You can create themes using modules to contribute to separate areas of pages to provide flexibility, enhance the user experience, and maximize performance. To optimize themes on your website, use the theme optimization module framework. The framework separates feature-specific logic and capabilities from the theme code.
    - URL generation in HCL Portal
      Generating Portal URLs correctly is one of the most important tasks in programming an HCL Portal based application. There are several programming tools and techniques available for generating HCL Portal URLs in custom code. The following section introduces the programming tools available and discusses when it is most appropriate to use each of the tools.
    - Model SPI overview
      Models provide information that is needed by HCL Digital Experience to perform tasks such as content aggregation or building navigation to browse the aggregated content. The information that is aggregated is represented through models that can be accessed programmatically by using the Model SPI (read-only). The information of a model is usually persistent (stored in a database) but can also be transient (computed and stored only in memory). Models can be represented by using a tree structure (nodes have a parent-child relationship), a list structure, or a selection structure (a selected element in a tree structure).
    - Controller SPI
      You can use the Controller SPI for portal administration. It allows you to modify portal resources. It enhances the read-only portal Model SPI by adding writable aspects.
    - User and group management
      The Portal User Management Architecture (PUMA) System programming interface (SPI) provides interfaces for accessing the profiles of a portal User or Group.
    - Portal Access Control interfaces
      Portal Access Control provides interfaces for retrieving and modifying and access control information of portal resources, such as portlets or pages.
    - Developing portlets
      Get an overview of the process of creating portlets, learn about the concepts of the APIs used to develop portlets, and view the samples to get you started. Also, learn about integrating features such as single sign-on, cooperative sharing of information using the property broker, and migrating Struts applications to the portlet environment.
    - HCL DX Portlet Bridge support for JavaServer Faces 2.2
      HCL Digital Experience 8.5 and 9.5 includes the HCL Portlet 2.0 Bridge for JSF 2.2. The bridge provides customers an interface to developing and running JSF Portlets.
    - Web Developer Toolkit for HCL Digital Experience
      Learn more about what you can do with the Web Developer Toolkit for HCL Digital Experience.
    - The Script Application
      The Script Application enables script developers to create portlets for HCL Digital Experience with HTML, JavaScript, and CSS.
    - The HCL Web Content Manager API
      You can use the Web Content Manager API to extend functions of HCL Web Content Manager.
    - Search REST API specification
      The following document describes the API call to search HCL Digital Experience. You can search HCL Digital Experience to find content that contains a specific text string in its title or content, or is tagged with a specific tag.
    - Extending tagging and rating by using service APIs
      Developers can enhance and extend the tagging and rating features of the portal. For this purpose the portal tagging and rating feature provides service APIs that you can use to enhance tagging and rating by your requirements.
    - How to create a custom launch page
      You can configure an authoring portlet to use a launch page of your own design instead of the default user interface.
    - How to create a custom HTML editor integration
      You can use custom HTML editors in all HTML fields of the authoring interface or specific HTML elements that are defined in an authoring template. Custom HTML fields are used to integrate third-party editors into the authoring interface.
    - How to use remote actions
      Remote actions are used to trigger actions from the HCL Web Content Manager application.
    - How to create custom plug-ins
      A custom plug-in is a reusable Java class that you create to run a task. You can create custom plug-ins such as custom workflow actions, plug-ins to run when a page is rendered, plug-ins to store multi-locale text strings and plug-ins to run when a file is uploaded.
    - Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal
      You can use the Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal framework to integrate data from external data sources on your portal pages by using HCL Web Content Manager presentation components. External data means that the data does not need to be stored directly in HCL Web Content Manager. For example, you can use DDC to render social data that you have on your HCL Connections server or on other social platforms in the context of your portal pages. Other possible data sources include news feeds, task lists, product catalog information, to name just a few.
      - Technical concepts
        Before you use the Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal framework, you can familiarize yourself with its main technical concepts and building blocks.
      - The rendering flow
        Read about the rendering flow of Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal.
      - Implementing user interactions
        With Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal, you can use HCL Web Content Manager presentation components for visualizing external data. As a further benefit, you can also add user interfaces for creating, modifying, and deleting external data to your DDC list appearance components. This way, your users can use these features to create, modify, or delete external data items from your lists.
      - Working with list-rendering profiles
        You can create new or derived list-rendering profiles. After you create a list-rendering profile, you deploy it.
      - Integrating remote XML data
        The Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal framework provides a generic XML DDC plug-in that is ready to use for integrating external XML data of your choice. You can use this plug-in to render external XML data on your portal pages without having to write custom Java code.
      - Integrating remote JSON data
        The Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal framework provides a generic JSON DDC plug-in that is ready to use for integrating external JSON data of your choice. You can use this plug-in to render external JSON data on your portal pages without having to write custom Java code.
      - Creating and deploying custom Digital Data Connector plug-ins
        You can deploy custom Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal plug-ins as plug-ins into the HCL Portal application extension registry.
      - Creating and deploying custom attribute value processor plug-ins
        You can deploy custom attribute value processor plug-ins for DDC into the HCL Portal application extension registry. Attribute value processor plug-ins can be used to process the value of an item attribute after the value is determined by the list rendering profile.
      - Digital Data Connector cache tuning
        To improve performance, you can tune the caches for the Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal framework.
      - Hints and tips for Digital Data Connector
        Learn about things that are useful to know when you work with the social rendering integration with Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal.
    - Determining the current web content context
      To determine the current web content context of a portal page or Web Content Viewer portlet, you can use the WCM Page Context Service. This service provides the ID of the currently rendered item of a page or portlet.
    - REST service for Web Content Manager
      Application developers can use Representational State Transfer (REST) services to work with Web Content Manager. The REST service for Web Content Manager provides authoring access to content items and elements. The service follows the Atom Publication Protocol, and Atom feeds, and entries are accessible in XML (application/atom+xml) and JSON (application/json) format.
    - Digital Experience Version 2 REST APIs (Beta)
      The API design for version 2.0 of the DX REST API is intended to facilitate the creation of HCL Web Content Manager assets.
    - How to display data from external sources
      You display data from external sources, such as SQL databases, by using the same methods as you would when you create a website.
    - Instrumenting web content for Active Site Analytics
      You can collect information from web content for Active Site Analytics.
    - Java messaging services for web content
      Web Content Manager supports for the notification of events such as item state changes, or services starting and stopping. These notifications can be delivered as messages to the Java messaging service.
    - Reference documents
      Reference copy of API, SPI, Javadoc, and more, for HCL Digital Experience 8.5 and 9.0.
    - Developing basic PAA file applications
      Solution developers can create their own Portal Application Archive (PAA) files. The developers can then use the Configuration Wizard to add on their applications to their HCL Digital Experience environment.
    - Developing advanced PAA file applications
      Developers can create their own advanced Portal Application Archive (PAA) file. The advanced PAA file contains custom content. The developers can then use the Configuration Wizard to add on their applications to their HCL Digital Experience environment.
    - HCL UX Screen Flow Manager
      The HCL UX Screen Flow Manager helps operators, developers, and dialog modelers develop fine-granular, small split portlets. Learn to configure the sequence, transitions, and workflow of a set of screens.
  - Troubleshooting
    This section helps you resolve problems, use diagnostic tools and tracing to capture HCL Digital Experience system errors.
  - Reference
    View information that can help you use the Digital Experience Help Center including directory conventions, terms of use, trademarks, a glossary, and more.
  - Glossary
    This glossary includes terms and definitions for HCL Digital Experience.
  - Content Template Catalog 4.4
    The Content Template (CTC) is a set of templates that accelerate the process of building a website.

Creating and deploying custom Digital Data Connector plug-ins | HCL Digital Experience

You can deploy custom Digital Data Connector (DDC) for HCL Portal plug-ins as plug-ins into the HCL Portal application extension registry.

About this task

The extension point ID for custom DDC plug-ins is com.ibm.portal.wcm.plr.BeanListProvider. Individual DDC plug-in implementations implement the com.ibm.portal.wcm.plr.BeanListProvider Java interface. This interface is defined in the public Digital Data Connector SPI Javadoc documentation.

Individual DDC plug-in implementations can delegate the initial bean list computation to the generic XML DDC plug-in and extend the returned bean list. They do so by modifying the bean list object that the generic XML DDC plug-in returns or by adding more computed attributes. To implement the computation logic for individual computed attributes, DDC plug-ins can use the optional com.ibm.portal.wcm.plr.ComputedAttributeValueProvider Java interface. If you implement this interface, the DDC framework calls the corresponding methods whenever a bean list attribute requests computed item attributes.