Oracle Webcenter Portal & Content Tips: View SiteStudio Dynamic List on WebCenter Portal application

Last week my coworker Daniel wanted to view the results of a Dynamic List on a WebCenter Portal Content Presenter Template. After a few test we saw that this feature is not suppported.

Under a Content Presenter Template (CPT) you can show any field of the DataFile, simple text, WYSWYG, static list of elements, but seems that the Dynamic List was missing by WebCenter developers ;-)

To solve this issue we created a custom TaskFlow that is capable of listing the elements of a Dynamic List (Element Definition).

First I've created a new Element Definition (ED) of type "Dynamic List", this ED will perform this query:

dExtension <matches> `docx`

This will retrieve all Word documents of the WebCenter Content (WCC).

Next, I've created a Region Definition (RD) with two fields, one of type "Single Text" and another with the DynamicList (ED) just created.

After that, I've created a DataFile based on that Region Definition, this is the resulting XML content:

<wcm:root version="8.0.0.0" xmlns:wcm="http://www.stellent.com/wcm-data/ns/8.0.0">
  <wcm:element name="text">This is a simple text</wcm:element>
</wcm:root>

As you see, there is not track about the ED with the DynamicList, but if you edit that DataFile on WCC interface this is how it looks

So, where is the information of the "Documents" section stored? In the Element Definition called "ED-DYNLIST".

This is the content of the ED file:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" standalone="yes"?>
<elementDefinition xmlns="http://www.oracle.com/sitestudio/Element/" xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.oracle.com/sitestudio/Element/ http://www.oracle.com/sitestudio/ss_element_definition.xsd">
    <property value="3" name="type"/>
    <property value="" name="description"/>
    <complexProperty name="flags">
  ...
  ...
    </complexProperty>
    <property value="" name="height"/>
    <complexProperty name="dynlistaddregioncontent">
  ...
  ...
    </complexProperty>
    <dataProperty name="querytext">dExtension <matches> `docx`</dataProperty>
    <property value="dDocTitle" name="sortfield"/>
    <property value="asc" name="sortorder"/>
    <property value="20" name="resultcount"/>
    <property value="false" name="limitscope"/>
    <property value="" name="targetnodeid"/>
</elementDefinition>

As you see the query is stored on <dataProperty> TAG.

Now that we have all the needed information, we can create the TaskFlow that parses the WCC query stored on the ED file, and show the results of that query under a Content Presenter.

Diagram of our TaskFlow