Generating and Viewing Activities

This section of the tutorial shows you how to generate and view activities in an application.

About this task

Now that your data sources are collecting information about changes to the data, you need to configure your entities to process that information and store it in the activity feed store. Once your application is processing activities, they will become available to users in activity feed widgets.

Procedure

In the Watson Explorer Application Builder administrator tool, open the settings page (the cog icon on the navigation bar).
Click the Application tab, and set Enable comment posting to on.
Navigate to the Entities page in the Application Builder administration tool and click the Book Title entity to begin editing the entity.
Scroll down to the Activity Feed section of the page and set the Monitor activities option to on.
This section contains options on how activity feed posts about this entity will be rendered. Many of the options define which of the entities fields are included in the activity feed post. For the purposes of this tutorial, leave all these options at the default value. You can find out more information about these options in the Entity Activity Feed Options section.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and click Save entity. Application Builder now requests all activity information about this entity type from the Watson Explorer Engine, processes it, and then sends it back to the Watson Explorer Engine to store in the activity feed collection.
Note: This process may take some time depending on your system configuration. Once all initial activities have been processed, any new activities are processed as they happen.
Finally, you need to identify which content the activity feed widget will find important on each page. By default, an activity feed only displays events that have happened to the subject entity. For this tutorial, we will add events from associated Book Titles to the Literary Agent entity activity feed.
1. Navigate to the Layouts page in the Application Builder administration tool and click the Literary Agent detail page.
2. Click the pencil icon to the left of the literary_agent_activity_feed widget to begin editing the widget.
3. In the associations field, enter assigned_books.
4. Scroll to the bottom of the page and click Save changes.
Activities that occur to associated books will now appear in the activity feed of the Literary Agent detail page.

Results

Now that you have produced an activity feed, view the widgets you created, post a comment on an activity feed, and choose to follow pages configured to display activity feeds. In the Application Builder administration tool, do the following:

Click the View App link from the title bar of the administration tool. The home page for your application displays.
From the Application Builder home page, click Book Titles. Scroll down and go to the next page until you can see the Tow Truck Tales link.
Click the Tow Truck Tales book title link. The index page for that book title and its associated content displays. Scroll down the page to locate the activity feed widget content that should now be displaying on this page. You can click the most recent activity notices to expand the item and display exactly the information that has changed.
Post a comment in the activity feed. Your comment will appear in the activity feed for the book.
Navigate to the list page for literary agents and select Tony Green. Notice that the post and activity for the associated book Tow Truck Tales is listed.

You have now completed the procedures to view, post and follow an activity feed on an application page.

You have completed the Application Builder tutorial, which shows the workflow for planning, building, and deploying a big data search application with Application Builder. The general workflow is to analyze your data to understand it, define your data in the form of entities, and build pages and widgets. This three-phase workflow can be repeated until the end result is a 360-degree application that is engineered to deliver the value of big data.

What to do next

Now that you have completed the Watson Explorer Application Builder tutorial, you can explore the other features of Application Builder. Consider the following tasks:

Look at your data and create additional entities. The data provided in the example-metadata and example-appbuilder collections contain many fields that could be used to filter the collections into multiple entities. For example, the example-appbuilder collection contains additional results that were not used in this tutorial that are identified by the type author. By using the same process that you used to create the Literary Agent entity, you can create an Author entity. Try creating it, and then, as an extra step, create an association between the new entity and the Book entity to show all the books that an author wrote.
There are many types of widgets available to use on Application Builder pages. Try adding some additional widgets to the pages and see what happens. Some sample chart widgets are listed in Defining Charts in Application Builder. The configuration for these widgets can be copied and used directly in the application that you created in this tutorial.
Make some changes to the search options and see what effect it has on the results delivered on the search page. You can use many options to optimize the search experience.