D2 Best Practices and all about Widgets

There are several best practices that we can follow and to list below are a few key important ones:

• Improving Content Transfer Performance

1. Enable compression of content:
2. Navigate to and open <install path of D2 Client>/WEB-INF/classes/settings.properties
3. Set the applet level properties parameters
4. Increase the socket buffer size

• Enabling Compression at the Application Server

1. Navigate to and open <TOMCAT_HOME>/conf/server.xml
2. Configure the threshold of the content size and the type of content to be compressed

• Optimizing Performance for Widgets and Large Numbers of Content

1. Navigate to and open <install path of D2 Client>/WEB-INF/classes/D2FS.properties
2. Configure a maximum result size for the Doclist widget, User and Group widgets, Thumbnails widget , Repository Browser or Taxonomy widgets.

• General Tuning Tips

On Oracle Server:

• Modify the Oracle sessions and processes parameters.
• Set CURSOR_SHARING to FORCE.

On the Content Server:

• Modify server.ini and set the concurrent_sessions parameter.

On the web application server:

• Modify the Java heap size, maximum threads, and GC policy.

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Configuration Files

Navigate to <install path of web application server>/webapps/D2–Config/WEB-INF/classes for the D2 Config configuration files:

D2-Config.properties, dfc.properties & logback.xml

Navigate to <install path of web application server>/webapps/D2/WEB-INF/classes for the D2 Client and D2FS configuration files:

applicationContext.xml, settings. Properties, logback.xml, D2FS.properties, D2FS-trust. properties

Note: The names of configuration files are case-sensitive.

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How do you configure a menu item for a Template Plugin?

We can configure a menu item using D2 Config to allow end users to call the custom action.

1. Log in to D2 Config and navigate to Go to > Menu D2 to open the D2 Client menu configuration page.
2. Add a new menu item to the menu in which you want the button to appear.
3. We then fill out the form for the new menu item.
4. Click Save.

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Facet Search

The facets widget allows the search refinement in a dynamic facet list. Facets are grouped by category and ordered based on the configuration or advanced search settings.

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D2 uses the EVENTS to communicate between widgets, Custom Widgets

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Internal Widgets

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How to set up an external Widget?

I used the D2 implementation of OAH, called D2-OAH.js which provides the binding between a web page and the surrounding D2 application. D2 Config refers to these web pages as external widgets, which are hosted in an iframe within the D2 Client web application. How to setup depends on which external widget we are trying to setup – like there is UpdateDoclist widget:

1. Extract UpdateDocList folder from D2 SDK.zip.
2. Stop the web application server.
3. Copy the UpdateDoclist folder to the <web application server>/webapps/ folder.
4. Start the web application server.
5. Log in to D2 Config:
6. Navigate to File > Import configuration from the menu bar.
7. Import UpdateDoclist-Config.zip
8. Navigate to Widget view > Widget from the menu bar.
9. Select the UpdateDoclist widget.
10. Modify the Widget url field to match the location of the web application server that we have deployed.
11. Log in to D2 Client and add the new widget to your workspace.

This is pretty much the standard procedure.

A more detailed information about D2 Widgets can be found in the D2 Administrative Guide.

Happy Reading!!!