Using friendly URLs without state information
By default, WebSphere® Portal URLs include navigational state information. If you configure pages for friendly URLs, the portal appends the state information to the friendly URLs. Some scenarios require short and fully human readable URLs that omit the state information. For such scenarios you can configure friendly URLs so that the portal does not show that state information.
About this task
The state information is an encoded aggregation of the
navigational state of the portal, the page, and its components, for
example, the portlets on the current page:
- The portal state includes page selection, expansions, label mapping, and action targets.
- The portlet state includes render parameters, window state, and portlet mode.
Some
scenarios require short and fully human readable URLs that omit the
state information. Examples:
- You do not want the URL to make the impression that it references dynamic content.
- You want the URL to contain only information that a human person can read and interpret.
- You want the URL to easily fit into the address field of the web browser.
- Internet search engines expect static URLs that reference one and only one resource or web page for the time that the page exists
- Internet search engines prefer short and friendly URLs.
- You configure themes to always display only short friendly URLs without the encoded navigational state.
- You configure pages that use that theme to display friendly URLs.
Notes:
To configure stateless friendly URLs without state information
for your portal, proceed by the following steps: - You can create friendly URLs for portal pages.
- If you configure your portal to show stateless friendly URLs,
you gain improved URL readability at the cost of losing the state
functionality. Example consequences are as follows:
- Portal URLs always point to the default state of a page, as they do not contain the state information.
- If a user clicks the Back button, or refreshes a page by clicking the Refresh button or the page title, the page moves back into the default View mode.
- If a user views a page and then creates a bookmark, clicking the bookmark later opens the page in the default View mode.
- Stateless friendly URLs do not contain the usual information about
the language of the page. The portal determines the language for the
page by the following order:
- First, the portal looks for the user preference.
- If the user preference is not set, the portal looks for the preferred language that is set in the browser. If the page is a public page, the user is an anonymous user. In this case, the portal also looks for the preferred language that is set in the browser.
- If the portal cannot determine a preferred language setting for the portal or the browser, it applies the default language that is defined for the portal.