SP12/SP20: Setting URL Dynamically in URL iView

[Dan_Wroblewski]

This is one in a series on new features in the latest portal releases -- 2004 SP Stack 20 and 7.0 (formerly 2004s) SP Stack 12. The features were listed in the blog What's New in the Portal for 2004 SP20 / 7.0 SP12. Here's another feature that customer's have been requesting for a while now -- the ability to set the URL dynamically for a URL iView. Or in other words, not to hard-code the URL at design time. What you can now do is get the URL from a parameter in the request to the URL iView. So when making a link to the URL iView, send a parameter (forcedURL by default) and set the value to the URL for the iView. The advantage is that a company that wants to create many URL iViews to different Web sites, can create one iView and then pass the URL as a parameter in the request for the iView.

Administrator Settings

Every URL iView can now determine whether it allows the URL to be set at runtime. There are two new URL iView properties:

• Forced URL -- Enable: Determines whether the URL can be set at runtime. If either this is true and there is no URL sent as a parameter, or this is false, the URL is taken from the URL property set in the PCD.
• Forced URL -- Parameter Name: By default, the URL iView looks for the forcedURL parameter, but you can tell the URL iView to look for a different property in order to set the URL.

For the official documentation, see Setting the URL at Runtime. For more information on creating URLs to portal components or to navigation nodes, see Triggering Navigation. The APIs described here also enable you to add URL parameters.

Other Changes to the URL iView

There have been several other changes to the URL iView in recent versions, which it's worth going over now:

• Locale-Specific URLs: You can define different URLs based on the current user's locale.
  For example, you can send English users to the main Google wWeb site and German user's to the German site.
  
  Select the Language-Specific URLs tab, and there you can specify URLs as well as parameters for each URL.
  You can get more information at Adding Language-Specific URLs
• User/System Parameters: Soon (SP13/21), you will be able to pass user and system parameters, which are retrieved dynamically and added to the URL at runtime.
  For example, you can pass in a URL iView the current user's mobile phone number or the last time the user's password was changed.
  You can also pass system information, such as the authentication method or the server name.
  The following shows the new options for setting properties in the URL iView.