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Creating categories by using external URLs

You can also use external URLs to represent categories to organize your portlet entities. The advantage of representing labels, or external URLs, with categories is that administrators can easily add, delete, and modify categories by using the Manage Pages portlet as the administrative user interface. Since categories are labels, or external URLs, they can be assigned localized titles and descriptions, which can be set with the Manage Pages portlet as well.

To assign portlets to these categories, you must point the external URL to a feed that returns either a list of portlet definitions or a list of portlet entities. These portlet definitions or portlet entities then represent the portlets that are shown as being part of the Applications palette.

  1. Create a custom tag and assign that tag to the applications you want in a custom application palette category. You can assign tags to portlets or other resources with the following XML which adds a tag called "CustomAppCategory" to a resource with a given Object ID (OID).

    <request
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="PortalConfig_8.0.0.xsd" type="update"> 
<portal action="locate"> 
<!-- Assignment of the tag 'sample' to the custom resource -->
<tag action="update" resourceref="oid_of_portlet" domain="comm" owner="uid=wpsadmin,o=defaultwimfilebasedrealm" locale="en">CustomAppCategory</tag>
</portal>
</request>

    The following is the general format when adding a tag to a portlet:

    <tag action="update" resourceref="<portlet object ID>" domain="comm" owner="<your portal admin full distinguished name and domain>" locale="en">TagName</tag>

    Use this format to create a tag if it does not exist, and you can assign as many tags as you want to as many portlets. This way, you can see the custom portlets displayed under just one category or multiple different categories.

  2. After adding tags to portlet resources, get a portlet entity feed of all portlets tagged with a custom tag using the following URL:

    https://your_dx_hostname/wps/mycontenthandler?uri=rm:empty?tmparam=tm%3aname%3aCustomAppCategory

  3. Open the Manage Pages portlet. To open the portlet, click the Administration menu icon then go to Portal User Interface > Manage Pages.

  4. Locate the category root label.

    For example, search for the label with the unique name com.ibm.portal.toolbar.applications.category.label.root.

  5. Under the application category root label, click New URL to create a new URL.

  6. Add a title and description in the Title and Description fields respectively for the new category. Click OK.

  7. In the Advanced Options section, select HTML as supported markup. Specify a Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) pointing to a feed that returns a list of portlet definitions or portlet entities.

    For example, the URL from step 1 has the following URI: rm:empty?tmparam=tm%3aname%3aCustomAppCategory

This creates a category in the application palette and all portlets in the provided portlet entity are added to the new category. For more information on portlet entity feeds, see Syntax for Addressing Portal Resources.