The gadget container

This module provides an open social compliant gadget container.

Using this module

To include this module in a Katari based application, put in your application context file (usually src/main/webapp/WEB-INF/applicationContext.xml), a line of the form:

<katari:import module="com.globant.katari.shindig"/>

Shindig needs to know where the application is running, so you need to configure the host name, port number, and context path. Override shindig.hostAndPort and shindig.contextPath:

<bean id='shindig.hostAndPort'
  class='com.globant.katari.core.spring.StringHolder'
  p:value='localhost:8088' />

<bean id='shindig.contextPath'
  class='com.globant.katari.core.spring.StringHolder'
  p:value='/sample-web' />

This makes the gadget container available for your application. You can make it available in any page you want. But first, you must make some gadgets available to show in it. In this version you must manually insert the gadgets into the applications table:

insert into applications (id, title, url) values (2, 'Activities',
 'http://localhost:8098/katari-sample/module/gadget/ActivityTest.xml');

This makes the activities gadget available in the application directory, a page where you can select gadgets and include them in your page.

To include the gadget container in your page, include this in it:

 <div id='custom-gadgets'>
   <div class='gadgetContainerTools'>
     <a href='${baseweb}/module/gadgetcontainer/directory.do \
     ?returnUrl=/module/institutional/dashboard.do&amp;gadgetGroupName=main'>
     Add ...</a>
   </div>
   <!-- will hold open social gadgets. -->
 </div>
 <script type='text/javascript'>

   $(document).ready(function() {
     katari.social.renderGadgetGroup('custom-gadgets', 'main');
   });
 </script>

As you can see, you need to create an html container (custom-gadgets in this case) to hold the gadgets. Then you initialize a GadgetGroup object with data coming from gadgetcontainer/getGadgetGroup.do.

The full signature of the renderGadgetGroup function is:

 katari.social.renderGadgetGroup = function(container, groupName, ownerId);

The ownerId is the owner of the gadget group you want to render. If not specified, it uses the gadget group owner by the viewer.

This example also adds a button to the gadget directory (gadgetcontainer/directory.do) to add new elements to the page.

Design

Domain model

The gadget container organizes gadgets in 'gadget groups', that contains a collection of 'gadget instances'. Each gadget instance has a reference to an application, basically the url for the gadget xml specification, and the views the application supports.

You can display gadget groups in a page.

There are three types of gadget groups: shared (the same gadget group is seen by all users), non shared (each user has his own group) or template.

Non shared gadget groups can be configured by the user, adding, moving or removing gadgets from the group.

Non-shared gadget groups can be created on demand: if a user tries to access a non existing non-shared gadget group, then katari creates one for him, from a gadget group template with the same name.

Each gadget group has a view. A gadget group can contain only applications with the default view, or applications that support the gadget group's view.

Configuration

If debugMode.value is set to true in the configuration property file, then the container does not cache the gadget xml spec and does not compress the social javascript files. This makes it easier to debug the javascript files and hot redeploy the gadgets.

You can also allow users to see other people's gadgets. You must implement the interface ViewerOwnerRestriction and declare it in you application context as:

  <bean id="gadgetcontainer.viewOwnerRestriction"
    class="com.globant.gadgets.MyViewerOwnerRestriction" />