Why isn't the page data tab showing in the Designer?

Question

I'm editing a page in the ToolTwist Designer, and I have all the normal tabs shown - edit page, navpoint, test page, source, etc, but the "Page Data" tab is not showing. How can I make the tab show, so I can enter page data for my page?

Answer 1

The page data tab only appears if there is a widget on your page that requires page data. You also need to editing the navpoint, rather than the page, because the page data belongs to the navpoint, and a single page definition might be shared by many navpoints. In other words, the page data allows widgets to appear different at various locations (navpoints) within the website.

If you are developing a widget that you wish to have use page data, you need to do the following:

In the Widget Controller class, implement the "UsesPageData" interface. This tells the Designer that the page data tab needs to be displayed when you click on a navpoint that references a page that included this widget, and on the tab it creates a section where the XML for this widget can be entered, specific to that particular navpoint.

public class CarouselTab extends WbdWidgetController implements UsesPageData

To give the user an indication of what XML the widget expects, you need to implement a method that returns template XML code. For example:

    public XData getInitialPageData(WbdWidget instance)
    {
        StringBuffer xml = new StringBuffer();
        xml.append("\n");
        xml.append("\n");
        xml.append("        id01\n");
        xml.append("        [Label 01]\n");
        xml.append("        [Add your widget here 01]\n");
        xml.append("\n");
        xml.append("\n");
        xml.append("        id02\n");
        xml.append("        [Label 02]\n");
        xml.append("        [Add your widget here 02]\n");
        xml.append("\n");
        xml.append("");
        return new XData(xml);
    }

Define a property that defines a name to be displayed above where you enter the XML on the page data tab:

    protected void init(WbdWidget instance) throws WbdException
    {
        instance.defineProperty(new WbdStringProperty("pageDataSection", null, "PageDataSection", ""));
        ...
    }

Use the page data when you are generating the page:

    @Override
    public void renderForJSP(WbdGenerator generator, WbdWidget instance, UimHelper ud, WbdRenderHelper rh) throws WbdException
    {
        ...
        Xpc xpc = ud.getXpc();
        xpc.start("tooltwist.wbd.getPagedata", "select");
        xpc.attrib("navpointId", WbdSession.getNavpointId(ud.getCredentials()));
        xpc.attrib("pageDataSection", pageDataSection);
        XData pagedata = xpc.run();
        // Do something with the page data
        ...
    }