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HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
Administering
Use the administration tools that are provided with the HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
Portal administration tools
Learn about the different tools that you can use to administer your portal.
Portal Scripting Interface
You can use the Portal Scripting Interface to configure your portal by running scripts from a command line.
Command reference for the Portal Scripting Interface
The HCL Digital Experience Scripting Interface component provides a scripting interface for the administration functions.
Portal Access Control
The scripting operations for access control differ fundamentally from content, layout, or the portlet repository. The reason is that access control data is not transparently cached on the client. To avoid many requests and slow response times for every simple lookup operation, a different programming model is adopted for access control data.

HCL Digital Experience 9.5 [Legacy content]
- Overview
  HCL Digital Experience provides a single access point to web content and applications, while it delivers differentiated, personalized experiences for each user across multiple touchpoints, such as web, mobile, hybrid mobile/web applications, and more.
- Supported migration paths
  Migration is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Supported installation and upgrade paths
  Installation and upgrade is supported between equivalent HCL Digital Experience offerings.
- Getting the software
  New and existing users need to register at the HCL Software License Portal and download their entitled HCL Digital Experience package(s).
- Creating your website
  Review the following topics to understand how to create your website using the latest HCL Digital Experience.
- Installing HCL Digital Experience
  Review the planning information on HCL Digital Experience, then select your operating system and 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 HCL Digital Experience to do various day-to-day administration tasks.
  - Roadmap: Syndication
    Syndication is the tool that is used to replicate data from a web content library on one server to a web content library on another server. The relationship between a syndicator and a subscriber can be either a one-way or two-way relationship.
  - Portal administration tools
    Learn about the different tools that you can use to administer your portal.
    - Portal administration portlets
      Administration portlets are supplied with HCL Digital Experience. Use them to perform administration tasks and actions on portal resources, give other users limited access rights on selected resources, and deploy custom portlets, themes, or skins.
    - The XML configuration interface
      Use the XML configuration interface (XML Access) for exchanging portal configurations.
    - Portal Scripting Interface
      You can use the Portal Scripting Interface to configure your portal by running scripts from a command line.
      - About the Portal Scripting Interface
        HCL Digital Experience provides a scripting interface that enhances the possibilities for automated solution deployment and administration of the portal. The Portal Scripting Interface allows you to create scripts that portal administrators can use to perform administrative tasks from a command line.
      - Getting started with the Portal Scripting Interface
        With the Portal Scripting Interface, you can administer your portal installation by executing commands. You can do that either interactively by typing the commands into a console window with interactive scripting and pressing the Enter key, or you can write the commands into a file and run that file. Here are some hints and examples for using the Portal Scripting Interface.
      - Work with the Portal Scripting Interface
        Learn more about the different modes that you can use with the Portal Scripting Interface.
      - Command reference for the Portal Scripting Interface
        The HCL Digital Experience Scripting Interface component provides a scripting interface for the administration functions.
        Script beans
        The portal scripting component adds Script beans to the wsadmin tool. These Script beans are objects with methods that work on the portal data.
        Portal objects
        Most portal objects are represented in the script by an object identifier string, which is based on the object ID in the portal. For example: _6_00KJL57F9D02H456_A .
        Tree navigation
        The Content, Layout, and Portlet beans each represent a tree hierarchy. The basic navigation methods are the same for all three. A tree bean provides methods to access the root node to look up the parent and children of a node, and to maintain a cursor that points to a selected node in the tree.
        Search
        All beans with tree navigation support identical commands for searching, but the available search criteria are different for each bean.
        Attributes
        All beans use similar commands to query and modify attributes. Attributes are identified by a name, such as uniquename, title, or markup.
        Organization
        For some beans, in particular the Content and Layout beans, the order of nodes is significant. In tree beans, the parent relationship of the nodes defines the hierarchy. Only nodes with the same parent node are in a particular order in trees.
        Content hierarchy accessed through Content bean
        The content hierarchy is a tree of content nodes. Content nodes can be labels, compositions, and links. Compositions are also called pages. Links can be internal or external. In the GUI, links represent the nodes in the Favorites list. Internal links point to a portal page, external links can point to any URL.
        Component hierarchy
        The component hierarchy is a tree of components on a page. Components can be containers and controls. A container holds other components, a control displays a portlet. The component hierarchy is accessed and modified by using the Layout bean, referenced as $Layout in Jacl.
        Portlet repository
        The portlet repository provides access to portlets, portlet applications, and web modules. To provide easy access to the relations between the repository objects, the repository is modeled as a tree. Unlike with the content and component hierarchies, the repository tree is not arbitrarily nested.
        Themes and Skins
        Themes and skins are two distinct sets of objects with a matrix relation, where each skin can be tied to any number of themes. The sets of themes and skins are accessible through the Look bean, which is referenced as $Look in Jacl.
        Portal Access Control
        The scripting operations for access control differ fundamentally from content, layout, or the portlet repository. The reason is that access control data is not transparently cached on the client. To avoid many requests and slow response times for every simple lookup operation, a different programming model is adopted for access control data.
        Access control objects
        The complete access control data for a resource is represented on the client by a PacList object. PAC stands for Portal Access Control. PacList objects are opaque, they cannot be manipulated directly. Instead, they are loaded into the PacList bean, which provides the operations to view and edit the objects. PacList objects are obtained from and written back by using the Access bean.
        Lifecycle - Portal Access Control
        PacList objects are read from and written back to the portal by using getacl and setacl in the Access bean. The command getacl returns the PacList object for a resource. It expects the category and identifier of the resource as arguments. The category identifies the Script bean that is responsible for the resource. It is given as a keyword, which can be the bean name or the type of the resource. The supported keywords are documented in the help for the Access bean. PacList objects are obtained only for resources that are handled by the Content and Portlet beans. For the root node of the portlet repository, there are no PacList objects.
        Global lists - Portal Access Control
        A global list holds the names of the predefined action sets. The global list is accessed with the listall command in the Access bean. The command expects the list name as an argument. The only supported list name is actionsets. See the bean help for alternative list names.
        Principals - Portal Access Control
        Use the list command to access the list of principals for an action set.
        Permission blocks - Portal Access Control
        Use the show command to access the flags that control distribution of permissions. The first argument is the name of the action set, and the second is the name of the flag to obtain. The optional keyword numeric indicates whether the flag value must be returned as a human readable string, or as a numeric value suitable for programmatic evaluation. Since the string value is subject to translation into different locales, only the numeric value can reliably be used in conditional statements. The numeric value 0 indicates a block, while 1 stands for allowed distribution. The following names are supported for the two flags. Alternative names are documented in the help for the PacList bean.
        Portal authentication
        The Portal bean handles functions that are outside of the responsibility of the other beans. This responsibility includes global data and technical aspects of scripting, such as the scripting session with the portal. The Portal bean is referenced as $Portal in Jacl.
        Examples
        The following are examples for deleting portlets and adding portlets.
        Troubleshooting the Portal Scripting Interface
        The following solutions help solve the troubleshooting issues.
        Property file format
        You can provide locale-specific attributes for a set of locales in a Java property file. The generic format of Java property files is described in the Java API documentation for method load in class java.util.Properties. The description here covers the particular properties that are interpreted when locale-specific attributes are loaded from a portal script.
        Index paths
        Index paths are used to refer to components in the component hierarchy. They are based on the index or position of a component in the surrounding container. An index path is a multidimensional index of a component, where the number of dimensions is equal to the depth of the component in the tree. Index paths are absolute or relative, depending on whether there is a leading slash. Absolute paths start with a leading slash and are resolved from the root component. Relative paths start with a number and are resolved from the selected component. Trailing slashes are irrelevant.
  - Web content administration tools
    HCL Web Content Manager includes tasks and tools to help maintain your content management system. For example, use the member fixer task to resolve renamed or deleted users and user groups. Use the workflow checker and updater tools to modify workflow security settings, reschedule pending actions, and add workflow to items. Web Content Manager also includes tools to assist with library and item management, and item and version history management.
  - Starting and stopping servers
    Various installation and configuration tasks require you to start and stop IBM WebSphere Application Server and the HCL Digital Experience application servers, deployment managers, and node agents.
  - Users and groups
    HCL Digital Experience offers you centralized administration of users and user groups, allowing you to better define users and manage user access rights. Users can register and manage their own account information, or an administrator can provision and manage users. Group memberships can be used to give the required permissions to access an object or perform a request.
  - Managing portlets, portlet applications, and iWidgets
    You must do some preparatory tasks before you make your portlets, portlet applications, or iWidgets available to your users by putting them on portal pages. This preparatory task includes installing, deploying, and configuring portlets, applications, and iWidgets.
  - Administering managed pages
    You can run advanced administration tasks for managed pages, such as generating URLs for projects or working with projects by using scripts, or working with vanity URLs.
  - Manage pages portlets
    Use Manage Pages to create, edit, activate, order, and delete pages and external web pages and labels.
  - Managing theme capabilities
    You can administer the theme module framework. This includes deploying resources that can be cached, configuring capability filters, and disabling the automatic prerequisite loading feature.
  - Managing community pages
    Community associations associate a portal page with a community in HCL Connections.
  - Managing your cluster
    After installing and configuring your clustered environment, you will need to manage the different parts of your cluster to ensure a highly available production environment.
  - Managing your site
    Earlier versions of HCL Digital Experience provided the Resource Manager portlet for performing site management. With Version 8.0 of HCL Portal and HCL Web Content Manager, this site management functionality has been replaced by the new functionality for managing pages.
  - Tagging and rating
    Get an overview of the administrative tasks related to tagging and rating.
  - Using WebDAV with HCL Portal
    HCL Digital Experience provides a Web-based Distributed Authoring and Versioning (WebDAV) implementation that individual services can use by plugging into. WebDAV is a set of extensions to the HTTP protocol that allows you to collaborate on editing and managing files on remote Web servers.
  - Virtual portals
    View information on how you can scope your HCL Portal to have multiple virtual portals.
  - Language support
    To reach as many users as possible, HCL Digital Experience supports different languages for different locations. For instance, a large, international corporation might address users in different countries or regions through multilingual Web sites. In this context the portal can concurrently serve portal views to large numbers of users, each in the user's preferred language.
  - WSRP services
    By using the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) standard. HCL Digital Experience can provide portlets, applications, and content as WSRP services.
  - Browser behavior and scenarios
    Browser behavior for the back button, bookmarks and history affect user interaction and cause unexpected results.
- 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.
- Docker and Containerization
  Find topic information about Docker and Containerization for HCL Digital Experience.
- Practitioner Studio
  Practitioner Studio is a newly designed user experience for HCL Digital Experience. Please see the following pages to understand how the new navigation is organized.
- HCL Experience API
  This shows developers how to provision, configure, and use the HCL Experience API with the HCL Digital Experience 9.5 platform.
- HCL Content Composer
  The HCL Content Composer delivers simplified processes for creating and managing Digital Experience site content.
- HCL Digital Asset Management
  HCL Digital Asset Management (DAM) adds a central platform to store and include rich media assets in Digital Experience site content to present engaging, consistently branded experiences across digital channels.
- The Woodburn Studio demo site
  The Woodburn Studio is a website that demonstrates the use of some of the popular HCL Digital Experience features.
- Reference
  View information that can help you use our product documentation including terms of use, trademarks, and more.

Portal Access Control | HCL Digital Experience

The scripting operations for access control differ fundamentally from content, layout, or the portlet repository. The reason is that access control data is not transparently cached on the client. To avoid many requests and slow response times for every simple lookup operation, a different programming model is adopted for access control data.

The collected access control data for a resource is represented on the client by an object. These objects are explicitly created, locally modified, and written back to the portal. All local modifications become effective when the object is written back.

Two script beans are provided for access control data. The Access bean, referenced as $Access in a script, is for reading and writing the access control objects. The PacList bean, referenced as $PacList, provides operations to view and edit access control objects.

The access bean and PacList bean provide the following functions:

Methods to request or release access list objects, and to load the permission set for view, edit, or manage permissions. For more information, see Lifecycle .
Methods to get a list of available action sets. For more information, see Global lists .
Methods to grant or revoke access for principals on the portal resource, or to view the permissions that are defined for the portal resource. For more information, see Principals .
Methods to set or clear permission blocks. For more information, see Permission blocks .