Content providers

The frames on a Homepage can display information or applications of different types. For example, one frame might show browse details data, another might show menu shortcuts, and another might contain a web page showing news, shares or currency information. A content provider must exist for each type of information or application that your users will want to access through their Homepage.

The content provider is a component that must be installed on your CODA Web server and Application server, then configured to enable it.

Some examples of content providers are:

• CODA Menu which enables CODA-Portal administrators to customise the menus available on a Homepage template, and optionally allows users to further customise the menus on their own Homepage. This content provider also enables shortcuts to CODA menu options to be set up; parameters can be saved with some menu options so that selecting the shortcut immediately displays the parameterised information.
• CODA e-Finance Browse Details which enables you to display browse details data.
• CODA-Intelligence KPI which enables you to display key performance indicators.
• HTML Browser which enables you to display another Web page within the user's Homepage.
• Third-party applications.

The CODA Menu and HTML Browser content providers are supplied with the e-Framework. Additional CODA content providers are supplied with other CODA Web applications.

The CODA content providers are written as Java extensions. You can write your own content providers to expose functionality from your applications to CODA-Portal. This enables you to integrate your own third-party applications with CODA-Portal.

When using the HTML Browser content provider, be aware that some Web pages prevent themselves from being embedded; the Homepage cannot handle such Web pages.

Content provider masters

Each content frame on a Homepage has a content provider master associated with it. The content provider master saves a particular configuration of a content provider. For example, you might have three content provider masters each using the Browse Details content provider, but each set up to log on to different servers or with different selection criteria.

The configuration of a content provider master can be modified at three levels:

• Within the content provider master itself. Only the CODA-Portal administrator can modify content provider masters.
• Within the Homepage template master if the content provider master is associated with a frame. Only the CODA-Portal administrator can modify Homepage templates.
• Within the user's own Homepage if the content provider master is associated with a frame and the user is permitted to modify it. The CODA-Portal administrator controls which settings (if any) users are able to modify.

One of the settings that the CODA-Portal administrator controls is whether users may refresh the data displayed in a frame on their Homepage. Typically the CODA-Portal administrator sets the default refresh frequency, then may optionally permit users to refresh the data manually. The date and time when a frame was last refreshed is displayed in the frame. Some functions will always display live data. For example, a frame using the Browse Details content provider might be set to refresh once a day, but within that frame if the user chooses to explode a line, the exploded details are always live data.

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