4.4 Integration techniques

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4.4 Integration techniques

In this section we explain how to implement the four portlets that comprise the Sales Workplace described in 2.3, "Case study: A simple sales tracking application" on page 47.

We show you how we constructed four portlets from scratch using the Portal Toolkit wizards. These portlets will include JSP pages where we will place the Domino custom JSP tags that allow us to access the Lotus Domino applications. Finally, when all four portlets are working on their own, we show you how we added some extended functionality, first people awareness to be able to collaborate with the people involved on the documents, and next to integrate our portlet at the portal level through Click to Action.

The structure of the portlet page is shown in Figure 4-9.

Figure 4-9: Domino custom JSP tags portlets

Now lets take a closer look at what each of the portlets will do.

• Customer List:

  The purpose of this portlet is to display the contents of the view Customer By Name from the customer.nsf Domino database. Later on, we will enable this portlet to handle people awareness and click to action functionality. When we finish the enablement of our portlet it will look like the one displayed in Figure 4-10.

  
  Figure 4-10: Customer List portlet

• Customer Detail

  The Customer Detail portlet, when first invoked, will display a form with a drop-down list containing the customers from the database. After a customer is selected, the portlet will display the details about the customer. When we finish the enablement of our portlet it will look like the one displayed in the Figure 4-11.

  
  Figure 4-11: Customer Detail portlet

• Customer Contacts

  The Customer Contacts portlet behaves similarly to the Customer Detail portlet. When initially viewed it will display a list of customers, and after a selection is made the portlet will display all the contacts for the specified customer. When we finish the enablement of our portlet it will look like the one displayed in Figure 4-12.

  
  Figure 4-12: Customer Contacts portlet

• Customer Sales Activities

  The Customer Sales Activities portlet initially displays a list of customers, and after a customer is selected, a list of past activities will be displayed. This list of activities is a view that is filtered by customer. When we finish the enablement of our portlet it will look like the one displayed in Figure 4-13.

  
  Figure 4-13: Customer Sales Activities portlet

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