navigationalState and interactionState

[Alexis BERNARD <al...@ds-fr.com>]

Hi all,

My question is not specially on wsrp4j but on wsrp in general (if you know
forums where we can talk about wsrp in general, please let me know...)
I am reading wsrp specifications and I don't understand the
navigationalState ans the interactionState...When I watch soap request I
see these parameters which seems to be generated...But I don't understand
what it contains and the interest of such parameters. For example, in the
case of navigationalState, is it  a kind of key which corresponds to one
portlet specific state with specific values in its form? If it is, how and
where it is stored?
I read that the consumer can supply a navigationalState to get a portlet in
a specific state...but how the producer get the portlet state with the
navigational state, should it be persistencialy stored?

Thank's for your help.
Alexis

Re: navigationalState and interactionState

[Peter Fischer <pf...@apache.org>]

Alexis,

this is actually even more generic than WSRP. Your question is more or less
about the basic state handling in portlets or even web appllications in
general...
To keep it simple let's concentrate on portlets - portlets have basically
the following types of states:

Persistent state
    properties or preferences or settings or data that is persisted for a
specific portlet like what news topics you prefer in your news portlet

Session state
    transient state that is only required in the current work-session of
your portlet but for several requests like the content of your shopping cart
portlet - this content cannot be bookmarked!

Navigational state
    transient state that must be available for several requests but must be
bookmarkable. E.g. if you have a portlet that implements a wizzard like
behaviour with several forms and next buttons to get to the next form - the
information already entered in the forms and the current panel displayed
should be stored as navigational state. A portlet implementation should then
encode the navigational state in the URL to enable the user to bookmark the
portlet with the current navigational state (all form data, the current
panel)

Request state
    transient state that is only required during one request like request
parameters.

WSRP reflects these types of states in the protocol and with the
navigational state it enables the consumer to store this state in URLs so
that an end-user on the consuming portal can bookmark e.g. the proxy portlet
with its current navigational state.

Hope that helps :-)

Cheers, Peter


----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alexis BERNARD" <al...@ds-fr.com>
To: <ws...@ws.apache.org>
Sent: Tuesday, February 17, 2004 4:54 PM
Subject: navigationalState and interactionState


> Hi all,
>
> My question is not specially on wsrp4j but on wsrp in general (if you know
> forums where we can talk about wsrp in general, please let me know...)
> I am reading wsrp specifications and I don't understand the
> navigationalState ans the interactionState...When I watch soap request I
> see these parameters which seems to be generated...But I don't understand
> what it contains and the interest of such parameters. For example, in the
> case of navigationalState, is it  a kind of key which corresponds to one
> portlet specific state with specific values in its form? If it is, how and
> where it is stored?
> I read that the consumer can supply a navigationalState to get a portlet
in
> a specific state...but how the producer get the portlet state with the
> navigational state, should it be persistencialy stored?
>
> Thank's for your help.
> Alexis
>