To help you perform Web clipping on sites that
you want
to include in your portlets, IBM® WebSphere® Portal Express® enables
you to create Web clipping portlets to specify how you want to tailor
the content of particular documents. To create a Web clipping portlet,
select Web clipping under Portlet
Management in the Administration tab of the portal.
For each Web clipping portlet
that you create with the Web Clipping
Editor, you can indicate the URL of the Web site being clipped and
other settings that influence how the content is clipped, including
the level of authentication required to access the site and whether
URL rewriting is performed on the clipped output. There are three
methods for clipping the contents of a page within the Web clipping
portlet:
- HTML clipping When this method
is selected,
the Web clipping portlet displays a rendered view of the contents
from the specified URL. That is, it displays it as you would see it
in a browser. To select the elements of the page to clip, simply move
your mouse over the element and click on it. The element will be highlighted
to indicate that is has been clipped. To clear it, simply click it
again. This is not supported for iFrames.
- Keep
all content (default) When this
method is selected, no clipping is performed on the contents from
the specified URL. The contents are brought through untouched. This
method is useful if you simply want to create a portlet to proxy some
external content without filtering it.
- Text clipping Text clipping allows the
contents from the specified URL to be clipped based on a pair of strings
whose occurrences within the content denote the boundaries of the
portions of content to be retained. The pair of strings is specified
by the user, the first string being the start string and the second
the end string. When selected, the contents from the specified URL
are searched for literal occurrences of the start string followed
by the end string. The portions of content between such occurrences
are presented to the user, allowing the user to select which occurrences
should be retained. This is not supported for iFrames.
Access to the HTML source of the clipped document is not necessary.
Once the Web clipping portlet is created, you can administer it as
you would any other portlet.
Tip: If you want to remove
a Web clipping portlet, use
the Delete capability of the Web Clipping Editor
portlet. This action removes all relevant information. If you delete
a Web clipping portlet manually, be sure to delete both the portlet
itself and its associated portlet application through Portal Administration.
Otherwise, you will not be able to create another Web clipping portlet
using the same name.
Adding Client Header parameters
After creating
a new Web clipping portlet, you can add parameters using Manage
Portlets to specify extra headers that will be sent with
each HTTP request for that clipping portlet. This is useful when the
clipping portlet needs to connect to a backend web server that requires
extra information to be sent as part of the request. The following
table provides required format examples for header parameters:
Table 1. Required format examples for header parameters| Header value |
Description |
|---|
| header1.name |
headerName |
| header1.value |
headerValue |
| header2.name |
headerName |
| header2.value |
headerValue |
These name and value pairs will then be read by the clipper
and sent as extra headers on EVERY HTTP request.
Note: In the case
where a clipping portlet has been deployed on a page and then the
extra header parameters are added later, the portal will have to be
restarted so that the clipping portlet picks up the new parameter
values. If you add a header name that is already used by the clipping
portlet, the newly added header will be ignored.