Extending social lists by using the digital data connector

The social rendering feature in IBM® WebSphere® Portal Version 8.5 is implemented as a IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for WebSphere Portal plug-in.

About this task

This approach makes it possible to use the extensibility features of this framework to extend the social rendering feature with extra capabilities:
  • Realize custom queries against the IBM Connections server.
  • Retrieve data from Connections services other than the search service.
  • Make it possible for portal site visitors to contribute social information through user interfaces that are generated by IBM Web Content Manager features.
  • The social rendering Digital Data Connector plug-in
    To implement the IBM Connections data integration, the social rendering feature in IBM WebSphere Portal Version 8.5 uses a custom IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for WebSphere Portal plug-in.
  • Implementing custom Connections queries
    IBM Connections provides a comprehensive remote API. You can use this API to access social data through Atom feeds.
  • Dynamic Connections source URL construction
    To dynamically construct IBM Connections query URLs, you can use the [Plugin:ConnectionsContext] and [Plugin:ResourceURL].
  • Organizing your custom Connections queries
    For the different query URLs that you want to use, you can create multiple dynamic or static IBM Connections query URL components. For convenient use of these query URL components, you can create a generic authoring template for all list definitions that you want to build from those queries.
Parent topic: Social rendering
Related concepts:
IBM Digital Data Connector (DDC) for WebSphere Portal

Related information

The IBM Connections context rendering plug-in
Using the list-rendering cache