Websphere Portal theme navigation context menus

Brian — Fri, 01 May 2009 15:06:55 +0000

I spend a lot of my day working with WebSphere Portal server, and as of late, spending more time (than I’d like!) with themes & skins. I am currently working with Portal v6.1, but the information below should be useful for previous versions as well.

Our portal is pretty open, we want people to come in & customize it as much as they’d like. One feature that we allow is for the user to come in & create new pages. We are running our own theme policy which is a copy of the DoubleTopNav policy. Our theme displays these 2 levels of navigation at the top, and we have no side navigation.

The hurdle I ran into was – how do I prevent the “New Page” option from appearing in the portlet menu for pages in the second level of navigation? The way the out-of-the-box Portal theme works is that when you create a new page, it is created as a child of the page that you are on. This works fine for top level pages, but there no policy or rule that can be set to prevent the “New Page” option from appearing in the portlet menu for second level pages.

The solution, proposed by a member of the Portal team was to create an alternate pageContextMenu.jsp which simply didn’t have a “New Page” option. Since the call the that JSP is done via AJAX, prior to the call we can determine what navigation level we are on and call the appropriate version of pageContextMenu.jsp.

Piece of cake, right? Eh .. maybe not cake, but not all that difficult. After creating the new pageContextMenu2.jsp & removing the “New Page” option, the next place to go is head_inlineJS.jspf. Below is the code I have added/modified to the head_inlineJS.jspf.

<%– START – see if we are in 2nd level of navigation –%>
<%
String pageContextMenuJSP = "pageContextMenu";
%>

"2" stopLevel="3">

if nodeInSelectionPath="yes">
<%
//it’s in selection path & it’s selected (this is the page we are on!
if (wpsSelectionModel.isNodeSelected(wpsNavNode)){
int level = wpsNavLevel.intValue();
if (level == 2) {
pageContextMenuJSP = "pageContextMenu2";
}
}
%>

<%– END – see if we are in 2nd level of navigation –%>

<%– Context Menu Initialization –%>
"pageNoActionsText" >‘nls.engine’ key=‘info.emptymenu’ />
(function(){

var pageMenuURL = ‘’;
<%– OLD var pageMenuURL = ‘’; –%>

Now that you’ve got that taken care of, touch head.jspf && touch Default.jsp, reload your page and you should no longer see “New Page” as an option in the page drop down for pages in the 2nd level of your navigation.

That worked and was a thing of beauty .. well, almost. I wasn’t a big fan of looping through the entire navigation model, but I didn’t know any other way. I ran the code past my colleague from the Portal team and he pointed me at the navigationSelectionModel. The code below is smaller & faster. Best of all – it works

<%– 2009.05.04 OLORE – see if we are in 2nd level of navigation –%>
<%
String pageContextMenuJSP = "pageContextMenu";

int level_count = 0;
for (java.util.Iterator i = nsm.iterator(); i.hasNext(); ) {
NavigationNode node = (NavigationNode) i.next();
level_count++;
}
if (level_count >= 4) { // level 4 == our 2nd level of top navigation (shouldn’t ever be >)
pageContextMenuJSP = "pageContextMenu2";
}

%>
<%– 2009.05.04 OLORE – see if we are in 2nd level of navigation –%>

<%– Context Menu Initialization –%>
"pageNoActionsText" >‘nls.engine’ key=‘info.emptymenu’ />
(function(){

<%– 2009.05.01 OLORE – use pageContextMenu2 if we are in 2nd level nav –%>
var pageMenuURL = ‘’;
<%– 2009.05.01 OLORE – use pageContextMenu2 if we are in 2nd level nav –%>

My Lotusphere session

Brian — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 03:01:54 +0000

Come check me out at Lotusphere 2009.

Session Title: Innovation with Integration: IBM’s “Next Generation” Intranet Portal
Session Track: ID503
Track Three: Planning and Managing Your Collaboration Infrastructure

Continuous innovation of IBM’s enterprise portal, in a rapid, non-disruptive, evolutionary manner is a major goal of the “ODW Next” project. The On Demand Workplace (ODW) is IBM’s single point of entry for employee intranet access (w3.ibm.com). It serves as the “front door” to IBM’s internal transformation activities, providing a personalized work environment for more than 350,000 employees, in over 100 countries. The approach of ODW Next is to couple a live innovation platform – a “perpetual beta” – alongside the production environment, to obtain the maximum benefits of live usage and continuous feedback from a statistically significant number of global employees, while minimizing risk to the steady state production systems.

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Websphere Portal theme navigation context menus

My Lotusphere session