3 Replies Latest reply on Jun 27, 2005 10:57 AM by mholzner

    Portlet resizing

    kriscott

      When a porlet is resized, such as Test portlet, (i.e. from VIEW to EDIT) other porlets' width gets resized as well. Also, Hello porlet's height gets stretched all the way down to match the heght of the grid.

      This behavior gave me an illusion that I was looking at different page when it's not.

      I hate to mension names because I am a strong JBoss supporter but I must in this case.

      I could be wrong but it seemed to me that Jetspeed and uPortal do not exhibit this behavior. At least, they don't make the page look different when porlets are resized as JBoss portal do.

      I personally like to see if porlet could be rolled up, when minimized.

      One more thing, when portlets are maximized, the width of resized porlet exceed the width of previous INVISIBLE width of entire portal.

      All this may sound like personal disliking of JBoss Portal's look and feel but I think the real issue here is how users perceive changes on screen.

      On a typical portal, there would be many portlets on screen. If a user makes changes to one portlet, it shouldn't give an illusion that other portlets are changing. I think this distrupts end users perceptions, making looking at JBoss portal somewhat uncomfortable.

      Is there a way to modify this behavior?

        • 1. Re: Portlet resizing

          yes, there is.

          This behavior is encapsulated in the layout and theme .
          We ran out of time to deliver a better experience, but you can plug in your own very easily. write your own layout (jsp) that maps out the outer most frame (the markp), and lays out the regions that will be hosting portlets (left , header, center, right, etc. ). Then you can use a render set to render the markup for each region (use an existing one, or write your own). This gives you very fine control over the markup that is being rendered for each region, each portlet window in a region, the decoration (state and mode links), and the portlet content for each portlet.
          Furthermore, the layout strategy allows you to act on maximized, minimized , etc. events. To top it all off, you can use a theme to make it all look realy pretty.
          I agree that this should all be delivered OTB in an ideal world, but we simply ran out of time. There are some people thinking very hard about this right now, since we'd like to standardise on the id and class attribute names to allow for more interchangeable themes. The nice thing is also that this can be delivered without a new portal release. Now it just has to happen ;) .... in the meantime, roll your own as described above.

          • 2. Re: Portlet resizing
            kriscott

            Martin,

            I am very glad that JBoss has the capability to do so. Thanks for answering and addressing my concerns. Is there new documentation coming out to describe how to go about doing that?

            • 3. Re: Portlet resizing

              not sure about the doc. Roy would have to answer that. I've been meaning to write up at least the important parts of it, but never got to it....