Developing Custom Portlets

Introduction to Portlet Development

Portlets are the information display components of the SAS Information Delivery Portal. A portlet can process requests from the user and generate dynamic content such as report lists, alerts, workflow notifications, or performance metrics. In addition to a set of standard portlets, the SAS Information Delivery Portal provides a framework that enables you to develop and deploy custom portlets that meet your organization's needs. This framework, which is based on the open-source Struts architecture and conforms to industry-standard Model-View-Controller (Model 2) design patterns, provides the following:

an execution environment that allows portlets to execute in the portlet container, in the same way that servlets execute in the servlet container. The SAS Information Delivery Portal processes all HTTP requests for portlets, while the session and state information are maintained and shared among portlet actions and across requests.
support for portlets running remotely in other Web technology frameworks, with the option to pass the session and state information to these portlets.
simplified portlet deployment through the use of the following:
- a portlet deployment descriptor, which is an XML file that specifies the portlet's actions as well as initialization, path, and access control information.
- a portlet archive (PAR) file, which includes all of the elements needed to deploy a portlet or series of portlets, including the portlet deployment descriptor, JavaServer Pages (JSP) files, custom Java classes, and associated resources (such as images, resource bundles, and HTML files).
a set of action and initializer classes, which reduce the need for developing custom programs. These classes perform many commonly used functions, such as displaying the JSP page that is specified in the portlet deployment descriptor.
access to SAS custom tags and to tags in the Struts development framework to simplify development of JSP pages for your portlets.

Portlets that are created with the framework provided in the SAS Information Delivery Portal have a standard appearance, which includes a title bar that contains icons that link to portlet actions, as shown in the following examples:

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