Workoliday

The purpose of the workoliday project is to make it easy to integrate external content into Polopoly. This project consists of a Polopoly plugin, Workoliday Plugin and a Polopoly client web application.

Use cases

• Display content coming from any type of external source, HTML, RSS, XML, JSON.
• Expose your site's header and/or footer to other sites (to make a wordpress site look like your site ;).
• Cache your own elements or content that are slow.

How to use Workoliday

In Polopoly you create a content called External Data Cache. You can find it on the page or site's sources tab.

1. Enter the URL to the external resource
2. If you need to transform the result of the external resource before it gets stored on the content, you need to create a Transformer.
3. Set an update interval on the content. The update of the content will be handled by the Workoliday webapp.
4. Start the Workoliday web application if it is not already running and watch the magic!

In the current implementation, the configuration of the external data cache is separated from web publishing (the cache template does not have its own output template). This was implemented due to permission requirements in the original project. To be able to display the cached content you need to create a Transformer Element on the page and insert the configuration content.

How to start/stop the Workoliday webapp

The web application is configured to update the content with the user workoliday (web.xml). The workoliday user is automatically imported when the plugin is imported.

Start: http://localhost:8080/workoliday/updateExternalCache?action=start

Stop: http://localhost:8080/workoliday/updateExternalCache?action=stop

How to monitor Workoliday

The Workoliday web application exposes some statistical data via JMX.

• How many content that is currently in the index
• Number of successful/failed updates
• Top list over successful/failed content ids and their resources they are requesting

How to add Workoliday to your project

Binary dependency

The binary dependency is most useful for demo purposes. It requires a Greenfield Times installation, since it will add the workoliday templates to Greenfield Times content. In the top pom.xml of your project, add a dependency to the workoliday plugin.

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.atex.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>workoliday-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.0</version>
     </dependency>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.atex.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>workoliday-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.0</version>
        <classifier>contentdata</classifier>
     </dependency>
</dependencies>

If you want to start the workoliday web application along with all the other web applications running in Polopoly Nitro, add the following snippet in the top pom.xml of the project in the jetty plugin section.

<contextHandler implementation="org.mortbay.jetty.plugin.JettyWebAppContext">
  <warArtifact>
    <groupId>com.atex.ps.workoliday</groupId>
    <artifactId>workoliday</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <type>war</type>
  </warArtifact>
  <contextPath>/workoliday</contextPath>
</contextHandler>

Source dependency

Checkout the workoliday project. In the top pom.xml of your project add the workoliday plugin and the workoliday web application as modules to the project.

<modules>
    ...
    <module>../workoliday/workoliday-plugin</module>
    <module>../workoliday/webapp-workoliday</module>
</modules>

Also add a dependency to the workoliday plugin:

<dependencies>
    <dependency>
        <groupId>com.atex.plugins</groupId>
        <artifactId>workoliday-plugin</artifactId>
        <version>1.0</version>
     </dependency>
...
</dependencies>

If you want to start the workoliday web application along with all the other web applications running in Polopoly Nitro, add the following snippet in the top pom.xml of the project in the jetty plugin section.

<contextHandler implementation="org.mortbay.jetty.plugin.JettyWebAppContext">
  <warArtifact>
    <groupId>com.atex.ps.workoliday</groupId>
    <artifactId>workoliday</artifactId>
    <version>1.0</version>
    <type>war</type>
  </warArtifact>
  <contextPath>/workoliday</contextPath>
</contextHandler>

Note on the Polopoly version

Both the workoliday plugin and webapp depend on polopoly. The polopoly version stated in the pom's is the earliest compatible/tested version of polopoly (10.6.1). The workoliday plugin will use the polopoly version available in the context it's running in. Normally this would be the one available in the Polopoly GUI webapp where the plugin is running. The workoliday webapp on the other hand will pack a polopoly.jar file in it's WEB-INF/lib directory inside the generated workoliday.war. This means that to run the workoliday webapp against another version of polopoly you would currently have to rebuild the workoliday WAR file to have it match your version.

Rebuild the webapp for another Polopoly version (10.8.0 in the example) by setting the polopoly.version property like this:

mvn install -Dpolopoly.version=10.8.0

The workoliday plugin and webapp are continuously tested on the latest version of polopoly as well as on the previous compatible versions .