Understanding Pages and Page Templates

About Pages

When SAS Information Delivery Portal samples are loaded during portal configuration, the following templates and links are created by default:

home page template with a collection portlet and bookmarks portlet added to users' home pages
link to the SAS home page
link to SAS Integration Technologies

In addition to the home page template and the default portal links, the Portal Application tree is created when either of the following is true:

Portal samples are loaded.
Portal is started for the first time in the Web application server.

The SAS Information Delivery Portal uses pages to present and organize information. Here is an example of a portal that contains several pages, which are represented by links in the navigation bar:

In this example, the page named Home is the active Web page. Notice that the name of the page is highlighted in the navigation bar. To display one of the other pages, you click the page's name in the navigation bar.

Each page contains one or more portlets. Portlets are the rectangular display components that contain the links, graphs, reports, and other information that is available in the portal. A page can contain any number of portlets.

A banner spans the top of the portal, and the top right corner of the banner contains several links. The Options link in the banner displays a menu from which you can perform common management tasks. For example, you can create, edit, remove, and share pages by using this menu.

Every page inherits the theme that is applied to the portal. A theme defines the portal's colors, fonts, banner, and graphical elements. You deploy themes separately from pages. For more information about Web Application themes, see SAS Intelligence Platform: Middle-Tier Administration Guide.

Each page in the portal has an associated rank number that determines the order in which pages are listed in the navigation bar. The pages are ordered by rank from lowest to highest. Pages with equal rank are listed in the order in which they were created. The default value is 100. In the portal, you can choose to override page ranks by explicitly defining the order of pages.

You determine how rank values are used for your organization. You might use rank to group different categories of pages. For example, you might reserve a range of 1–24 for the most important types of pages in your organization. The next range of 25–49 could be used for pages that are slightly less important. When you rank pages by using a range of values, you provide the flexibility to order pages for a wide range of portal users.

Who Can Administer Pages

In addition to creating, editing, and deleting your own personal pages, you can perform the following tasks depending on your permissions:

Page Administrators

User Type	What the User Can Administer
SAS Trusted User	Can share, unshare, edit, and delete any page in the SAS Information Delivery Portal, including a page that someone else has created. Although the SAS Trusted User (known as the portal administrator) can administer the pages, it is highly recommended that the group content administrator perform these tasks. By default, the SAS Trusted User is a portal administrator. A portal administrator is granted WriteMetadata permission in the Portal ACT and has full access to the portal content.
Group content administrator	Can share any page that has been created by the group content administrator. Can unshare, edit, and delete any page that has been shared with the respective group, including a page that someone else has created. The SAS administrator must manually configure permissions for a group content administrator. A group content administrator can be configured for the PUBLIC group.
All portal users	Can create, edit, and delete only personal pages.

For more information about the permissions that are granted to these users in SAS metadata, see Administering the Portal.

Understanding Customized Page Deployment

The SAS Information Delivery portal gives each user a personalized virtual workplace within a Web browser. This workplace is referred to as a portal view. When you deploy the portal, you can customize views of the portal for different groups of people by deploying different pages to those groups. This enables you to ensure that users have access only to the information that is appropriate.

Users who are deploying a page can complete the following tasks:

create the page
add portlets to the page
add content to the portlets

In addition to the tasks performed by users, content administrators can perform the following tasks:

set up access control for the content. This task can be accomplished with the SAS Management Console Configuration Manager plug-in.
share the page with a group of users who have permission to access the content.

For example, suppose that you want to provide different types of information to engineers, to sales people, and to managers. First, make sure that a group identity has been defined in SAS metadata for each type of user, and that the group contains the applicable user definitions. Next, you create pages and share them with the appropriate group. The portal users who belong to the group see only the pages that are shared with their group.

After users log on to the portal, they can edit pages, add new pages, and personalize their views. For example, users can subscribe to content channels that are of interest to them, create links to Internet sites that are visited frequently, and change the navigation scheme.

To facilitate the process of deploying views, you can designate a group content administrator for each group that is defined in SAS metadata. This person can assume responsibility for creating and sharing pages with the respective group.

Page Attributes: AVAILABLE, DEFAULT, and PERSISTENT

Pages have attributes that define how a page is associated with a portal view. These attributes determine the following:

whether the page is added automatically to portal views, or whether users add the page manually to their views
whether users can remove the page from their portal views after the page has been added

The following table shows the three attributes that associate pages with portal views:

Page Attributes

Attribute	Description
AVAILABLE	The page is added manually to portal views. Users typically search for the page and then add it to their portal views. After adding the page, users can later remove the page from their portal views if they no longer need the page.
DEFAULT	The page is added automatically to portal views. Users see the page when they log on to the SAS Information Delivery Portal. Users can later remove the page if they do not want it in their views.
PERSISTENT	The page is added automatically to portal views. Users cannot remove the page from their portal views.

DEFAULT is the default value for every page that you create in the portal. After you create a page, if you share that page, then you can apply any one of the three attributes to the shared page. For more information, see Shared Pages.

Personal Pages

When you create a new page in the portal, that page by default is a personal page. A personal page is owned by the person who created it. All users who can log on to the portal can create personal pages in their portal views.

Here are the characteristics of a personal page:

The user who created the page owns that page. This user can edit and remove the page.
No other users can access, edit, or remove the personal page, except a portal administrator.
If the owner of a page is also the group content administrator, that owner can share that page with other groups. Shared pages are described in the next section.

Shared Pages

If you have administrative permissions, you can share a page with a user group that is defined in SAS metadata. You can share pages with either of the following groups:

PUBLIC group, which contains all portal users. It is convenient to share pages with the PUBLIC group because all users in that group, by default, have access to the pages.
A specific group that you define, such as “Sales Managers.” In this case, the pages are shared only with that specific group that you defined.

When you share a page with a group, you do not create multiple instances of the page. There is only one instance of the page, but that page is owned by a group rather than by an individual.

If you share a page that contains portlets, you can specify whether you also want to share the portlets and their contents.

Note: When you share a page that contains a Stored Process Alerts portlet, a Bookmarks portlet, or a Publication Channel Subscriptions portlet, these portlets cannot be shared. If you want to provide these portlets to users, consider creating a page template instead. See Page Templates .

After you share a page with a group, when users who belong to the group log on to the portal, the shared page is available to them. The share type attribute (DEFAULT, AVAILABLE, or PERSISTENT) that you apply to the page determines how portal users access the page:

Pages that have a share type of DEFAULT or PERSISTENT are added automatically to portal views for the respective group members. (The page is not added automatically to the portal view for portal administrators.)
For pages that have a share type of AVAILABLE, group members must search for the page before they can see it. Group members can add the AVAILABLE page to their portal views.

Only users who are authorized as an administrator for the group can edit a shared page. You can edit both the content and the properties of a shared page. For example, you can add or remove portlets, and you can unshare the page. Any changes that you make to a shared page are seen by all users who can access the page.

You can also permanently delete a shared page from the portal. When you permanently delete a page, that page is removed from all portal views.

Portal users who can access the shared page can remove the page from their individual portal views if the shared page has an attribute of DEFAULT or AVAILABLE. If the shared page has an attribute of PERSISTENT, the portal administrator or group content administrator can remove the page from a portal view. However, it is strongly advised that the group content administrator perform this task.

For general information about sharing portal content, see Sharing Content in the Portal .

Types of Edits That Can Be Made to a Page

If you have the appropriate permissions, you can edit a page in several ways:

change the label, description, or keywords for the page
change the number of columns on the page, and re-position the portlets within the columns
add predefined or custom portlets to the page, or create new portlets and add them to the page
remove portlets from the page
share a page, unshare a page, or change the group to which the page is shared
change the attribute that is applied to a shared page (for example, you can change the shared page from AVAILABLE to DEFAULT)
change the page rank that determines the order in which pages appear in the portal

You edit pages by using the portal Customize menu. For more information, see the online Help that is provided with the portal.

Page Templates

Overview of Page Templates

A page template is a page definition that is stored in SAS metadata and that is associated with a group (either PUBLIC or a group that is defined explicitly). The page template must have an attribute of either DEFAULT or PERSISTENT. You can create a page template from an existing page in the SAS Information Delivery Portal, or you can create a page template by running a SAS program.

When you define a page template and add it to SAS metadata, the following occurs:

The portal's metadata associates the page template with the group that you specified when you created the page template.
When a user logs on to the portal, the portal checks to see whether the user belongs to the specified group. If the user belongs to the group and does not yet have a page associated with this template, the portal creates a page from the template and adds that page to the user's portal view.
The portal checks for new templates every time the user logs on, and adds new pages as appropriate.

Note: Page templates are not related to portlet templates or themes. These are different entities that use the name “template.” For information about portlet templates, see Understanding Portlets . For information about SAS Web Application Themes, see SAS Intelligence Platform: Middle-Tier Administration Guide.

Main Features of Page Templates

Page templates offer an alternative to shared pages, and there are several reasons why you might want to implement page templates. Page templates provide the following features:

Page templates enable you to deploy pages without logging on to the SAS Information Delivery Portal. Unlike shared pages, the portal does not need to be running in order for you to create a page template and add it to metadata. A SAS program, LoadPageTemplateExample.sas, is provided with the portal.
A separate page is created for each user. Each user can edit the page that is added to his or her portal view without changing the pages that have been added to other user's views.

Note: All portal users can edit the portlets on the page by adding or removing content.
Page templates can contain portlets that are not shareable. For example, a page template can contain a Stored Process portlet, an Alerts portlet, a Bookmarks portlet, or a Publication Channel Subscriptions portlet.
As with shared pages, when you add content to portlets on page templates, users are shown only the content that they are authorized to see.
Page templates are defined as either DEFAULT or PERSISTENT. This means that the pages are always added automatically to portal views.
Portal users can remove the page from their portal views as follows:
- If the page is defined as DEFAULT, users can remove the page from their portal views.
- If the page is defined as PERSISTENT, users cannot remove the page unless the portal administrator first removes the page template from SAS metadata.

The following limitations apply to the creation of page templates:

A page template cannot be created from a page that was previously created by a page template.
A page template cannot be created from a page that is currently shared.

After you have created a page template, you cannot edit it. However, you can delete the page template and create it again. For more information, see Adding, Editing, and Removing Page Templates.

The Home Page Template

After you install and configure the SAS Information Delivery Portal, when you first log on to the portal, you see the Home page. The purpose of the Home page is to help users as they begin to add content to their portal views. Here are the characteristics of the Home page template:

The template has an attribute of PERSISTENT, and is associated with the PUBLIC group. This means that all users see the Home page when they log on to the portal, and they can search for and add the page to their portal view.

Users cannot remove the Home page from their portal views unless the portal administrator first removes the Home page template from SAS metadata.
The page contains a collection portlet and a Bookmarks portlet.
All users can edit the portlets by adding or removing content. Users can also edit the page. See Types of Edits That Can Be Made to a Page.

Although the portal administrator can see every user's Home page, it is not a good practice to use the portal administrator's account to perform regular tasks such as viewing the Home page or adding a Home page because it is difficult to distinguish whether the Home page belongs to a particular user or to the portal administrator.