SAP Blogs: Page Builder Component

Saturday, July 2

Page Builder Component

The Page Builder Component is the one that assembles the content of a page according to the already defined page layout. For instance, for the first time,when you run the portal, the Page Builder will assemble the initial portal page, and also the content of the iViews in it. A portal page comprises of the following:

a default active layout and list of possible layouts
iViews that are located in the page

At the time of design, each page has one or more layouts. Later on, when iViews are added to that page, specific active page layout deterrmines their placement. All this is stored in the Portal Content Directory (PCD). SAP Enterprise Portal contains a set of pre-defined page layouts that are based on the layout templates. Additionally , new layouts can also be developed. The definition of a layout is brought out by proprietary tags that are used in Java Server Pages (JSP) which define HTML elements for the pages.

Layout templates can be created by the portal components, like HTML-Business for Java (HTMLB) that manage themes and styles, and also provide with a complete set of easy-to-use Web controls,that describe the HTMLB controls, their usage, types ,attributes, and how to set them with the JSP-tag libraries and the class libraries.

The Page Builder can also assemble iViews in a page like:

Inserting the output of the iViews into the HTML for a page while retrieval of these iViews.
as an alternate, IFRAMES in the page request for the content of iViews which can be from the Portal Framework, or from other sources too which can be the Internet Transaction Server (ITS) or any other Web site too.

Portal services cover functionality which is used by other services or portal components like the Page Builder, depend upon these services at runtime for coordination and process portal elements, that include the following: