Thomas Steinhener and Victor Leung from IBM presented a session on the Digital Data Connector. DDC is an out of the box framework for Portal that is integrated into Web Content Manager. DDC is an easy way to integrate any XML or JSON data using list rendering profiles. Caching is built-in to make the application performant.
One benefit is the ability for web developers to use familiar Javascript tools and skills to build fully functional portlets without needing Java skills. This benefit makes it quicker to get these applications into market.
DDC uses a plug-in architecture and a profile that maps data to WCM presentation templates. WCM then renders the content through its normal process.
A profile defines the list items through a list item selection which is the repeating entry or defines each record in the list. The attributes defined are available to the web developers. The profile can provide localization as well through resource bundles. For XML data, DDC supports Namespace declarations and XPath. For JSON, DDC uses . selection, like “entry.title”.
After you set up the List Profile, you then use WCM tags to insert the right tags to render the content in a presentation template. Attribute Resource tags are used to render DDC content. The tag will display all the attributes you included in the List Profile.
DDC provides a configurable template that lets you define the data source URI, the List Rendering Profile to use, and a Bean List Provider ID, which is the plugin you use.
The DDC plugin can be extended when you have custom data that won’t fit into a standard DDC plugin. You then have full control over the bean list creation process.
DDC has three contexts using render parameters to dynamically filter content produced by DDC. Data contained in attributes can also be processed through DDC processors. These processors are Java classes that can enhanced specific attributes. For example, if you want to combine three address fields into one final field, you can write a processor to do this within the DDC runtime.
