This presentation is part of the Portals Overview Self-Study Course.

Transcript

The Custom tab includes an array of activities that are called in order to populate the gadgets defined in the Narrow and Wide columns of the Tabs section that have the "Custom" field checked.  These gadgets do not normally have a matching Rule-Obj-HTML record in the Data-Gadget class; rather, an activity is called that processes information needed to produce the gadget and then calls the Show-HTML method to create the gadget.  The activity is built in the Data-Gadget class.

The first column is a button that matches the name of the gadget defined in the Column labeled "Gadget" in the Tabs screen.  The second column is the name of the activity built in the Data-Gadget class.  Note:  You can expand the second column and that you may define the value of a parameter to be passed to the activity.  This enables you to utilize the same activity for multiple gadgets and dynamically pass values given information about the user, the organization, or the gadget you wish to call etc.  For example, multiple gadgets can call a single Reports activity.  Each gadget passes a unique parameter of "Name" that tells the application which type of report to retrieve for that gadget.