Integrating Author It Compiled Documents with Strutsonlin

Integrating the end product of a content management tool with a web application is painful. Even if the web application is built on top of an MVC framework. Author It is a CMS tool that will let you build an html based documentation. The focus on this discussion is integrating an end product which is an online help documentation with Struts. 

The documentation will allow users to view the help page regarding the current page by clicking on the Help button from the menu bar of the application. The user can also search for any specific help pages she/he wants to view. 

The integration effort requires several files to be created/edited as listed below

1. onlinehelp-config.xml

2. onlinehelp.jsp

3. common.js

4. mainMenuBar.jsp

5. web.xml

6. OnlineHelpProcessor class

and several classes as shown below from the diagram

onlinehelp-config.xml

This file contains the mapping between struts/tiles and the online help html documentation page through its numeric code which is the prefix to the file name of the help page (i.e. 207.htm). There are two parent nodes in it - nonupdate and update. 

nonupdate node contains mapping for help pages that are "only" non-editable web pages while the update node maps help pages to editable web pages.

The element is the tiles definition name attribute. This configuration is read and cached when the application starts up. Think of the element as the help page file name appended with .htm.

onlinehelp.jsp

This is the original index.htm file generated by Author It tool, the entry point for all help documentation pages. There are three modifications to this file - import of the taglib struts-bean.tld, bean definition of the onlineHelpCode and the SRC attribute value of the frame element. 

The import of the bean taglib is needed to extract the SessionData bean which lives in the session and get the onlineHelpCode string value from it and plop it to the SRC element. It is important that this file is located where the jsp files are.

common.js

Of course we want the help page to be in a new window. This is where we add a new function that will open a pop-up window when the help page is invoked.

mainMenuBar.jsp

This is where the Help button is located and a javascript function to invoke the online help documentation in a new window is identified. This jsp file contains all the buttons necessary to provide functionality for the user.

web.xml

We don't want the onlinehelp-config.xml file to be read each time we invoked the help pages. There's 3 ways to handle this file

1. Read this file, convert it to Java Bean/Map and put it in session.

2. Read this file, convert it to Java Bean/Map and put it in cache.

3. Read this file, put attributes in a Map and put it in a singleton object.

I prefer the latter for simplicity and less coupling though all of them promotes efficiency. If the bean is put in session we are introducing a tight coupling with the container's session implementation. If a third party caching mechanism is used then we are tied to that implementation.

In this example I used the third option and have a servlet intialize the class that reads this file which is called OnlineHelpProcessor (Singleton). The method called for initialization from this class is initializeOnlineHelpCodes(). Its just basically reading the file and putting attributes in a Map.

When the application starts up, the singleton class is initialized and all the elements from the config file is put into a Map ready for access anytime.

OnlineHelpProcessor

This class reads the onlinehelp-config.xml file and converts the elements into a key/value pair in a Map and provides a method that takes in a struts forward name argument and returns the onlinehelpcode value which is later used to load the right help page.