Bea Systems, Inc.

Oracle International Corporation

Ray Polk

Cindy McMullen

Christopher E Bales

Nathan Olson

Jason Wille

A communities framework is disclosed which contains resources in a repository. The repository contains data stored in nodes wherein each node has data associated with a collaboration resource and each resource has a set of properties or attributes. A server can provide a content object for wrapping the node wherein the content object defines the type of resource contained by the data in the node. An extensible control is provided that performs operations on the node thereby providing an interface to manipulating the node's data. The extensible controls can allow developers to easily create new resources. A generic control can further wrap the extensible control and be adapted to provide an abstracted interface to the content object. An extensible portlet can implement the extensible controls in order to provide users with the ability to add new properties and edit existing properties of the resource.

System and method for providing extensible controls in a communities framework

An extensible control interface is provided to simplify access to the content management repository. Developers can write extension interfaces associated with new data types, where the extension interfaces extend the extensible control and are annotated with the control extension annotation. These new interfaces can specify the repository name and declare various methods annotated with annotations. Parameters of the various methods can also be annotated to supply needed information. Using an annotation process tool (APT), the developer can generate the bean and implementation classes and the methods can subsequently be called upon to perform operations on types in the repository. For example, the extensible control can take care of interacting with the type manager to perform the needed actions within the repository in order to create the new object classes and nodes. Object classes can be created on the first call, while node instances upon each call of the create method.

Extensible controls for a content data repository

A community that is accessed via a portal is disclosed, for maintaining user membership during collaboration on a project. A repository containing resources is provided wherein the data is stored nodes and each node is associated with a collaboration resource. The resources can each have a set of properties or attributes. A content object can be provided for wrapping each node and for specifying what type of resource the node holds data for. A generic control can be implemented in order to handle various business logic for the developer in terms of the collaboration resources. The generic control can deal with the content object wrappers instead of nodes. Developers can use the generic controls in order to obtain an abstracted interface to the content management system API. The generic control can also contain an extensible control for performing CRUD operations on the data nodes.

Growing community of inventors

Erie, CO, United States of America

Ray Polk