OSP-SPEC-4 - XSLT Portal

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Last updated: Oct 15, 2007Version comment
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Specification ID:

OSP-SPEC-4

Working Title:

New portal that incorporates features of osp-portal into the skinnable charon portal

Related Issue(s):

SAK-10151

Component(s):

XSLT Portal

Confirmation Status and Date:

Status: Confirmed
Date: 8/20/2007

Summary

The XSLT Portal is a new plugin renderer to the Skinnable Charon Portal. It allows for an XSLT developer to change the look of the portal. In addition, it incorporates features from the OSP Portal such as tool categorization. The main differences between the XSLT Portal and OSP Portal can be found below in the "Behavior" section.

Rationale

The OSP Portal is based on the old Charon Portal. The Charon Portal is deprecated and will not be maintained in future versions of the software. Additionally, as enhancements are made to the Skinnable Charon Portal, XSLT Portal will automatically pick up most of those enhancements.

Origin

This comes from the fact that the old Charon Portal was hard to customize since most of the mark-up was buried in code.

Community Acceptance

The XSLT Portal is currently not fully ready to replace the OSP Portal in all institutions. Work will be done for 2.6 to ensure that all use cases are met.

Behavior

The easiest way to demonstrate behavior is to highlight the differences between the XSTL Portal and the OSP Portal.

Site Type Landing Pages

site type landing pages are gone, this is replaced with the IU DHTML "more" area grouped by term and by site type. This has the advantage of allowing the user to specify which sites are shown without further navigation and also saves a round trip to the server for listing sites in a site type.

Tool Category Landing Pages

Tool category landing pages are gone. Instead, the tools are categorized in the left hand navigation area. This feature was borrowed from the rSmart CLE 2.4. In the rSmart CLE, we found that grouping the tools this way reduced clicks for the user while still providing context. We also found that, with the landing page, the user often was "hunting around" for the tool, trying to decide what categories to find it in. This also means that all the features of the tool category landing pages are gone, such as the role-based textual tool and category descriptions.

Function-Based Tool Hiding

Function-based tool hiding is not a feature of the XSLT Portal. Instead, it relies on the same mechanism for tool hiding as the Skinnable Charon Portal. The OSP Portal's tool hiding mechanism was cumbersome to configure as it required someone to set which functions of a tool would cause it to show up.

Single Tool in Many Categories

XSLT Portal does not support displaying a single tool in multiple categories. Since the tool categories are flattened out in one place, this would be confusing to the end user.

Skinnable Charon Features

Since xslt portal extends the new Skinnable Charon Portal, we now benefit from some of the Skinnable Charon features. These features include frame-less tools, tool icons and style-able portals. As more features are added to the Skinnable Charon Portal, xslt portal will continue to grow.

Future Control over Categories by Site

The XSLT Portal introduces the ability to change the tool categories through the "Sites" tool on the Admin Workspace. Eventually, this configuration will be a capability of the Page Order Tool, meaning that individual site owners can control which tools show in what categories and what the categories are called. This will allow for much more flexibility for the site owner.

Interaction

Actors:

  • System Admin - The System Administrator is able change the default tool order and categories through the toolOrder.xml and or through the "sites" tool.

Quality Metrics

N/A

Assumptions

N/A

Outstanding Issues

N/A