Partial Page Rendering URL

Introduction

In an advanced integration scenario, you might need to include a dynamic page fragment, maintained by WCMS (Web Content Management System), in an external web application such as E-Commerce websites. For example, only a specific portion of a product detail page at http://www.example.com/products/hippobloomy.html should be included in your E-Commerce website, excluding the top, menu and footer for instance, while keeping only the main content area of the page.

It is possible to define dedicated HST SiteMapItems and HST Pages separately for each includable page content for the external web application, but it is less convenient because you need additional configurations.

HST now supports partial page rendering URLs in a native way by allowing to specify "subPath" in navigational URLs. For example, a request on http://www.example.com/products/hippobloomy.html./main/content will render only the main/content component part, not the whole page. The "subPath" follows the delimiter, "./", after the normal navigational page URL.

SubPath to Specify Child Component Window Path

Suppose you have the following resolved component hierarchy for the page at http://www.example.com/products/hippobloomy.html:

/productpage:
  jcr:primaryType: hst:component
  # SNIP
  /top:
    jcr:primaryType: hst:component
    # SNIP
  /menu:
    jcr:primaryType: hst:component
    # SNIP
  /main:
    jcr:primaryType: hst:component
    # SNIP
    /content:
      jcr:primaryType: hst:component
      # SNIP
  /footer:
    jcr:primaryType: hst:component
    # SNIP

The component hierarchy for the page could be visualized like the following, too:

____________________________________________
|                  top                      | 
|___________________________________________|
|           |             main              |
|           |     ______________________    |
| menu      |     |       body          |   |
|           |     |                     |   |
|           |     |_____________________|   |
|___________|_______________________________|
|                  footer                   | 
|___________________________________________|

If you want to include only main/body component window, then the request URL should be http://www.example.com/products/hippobloomy.html./main/body. Or if you want to include only menu component window, then the request URL should be http://www.example.com/products/hippobloomy.html./menu instead. So, if developers know how the components are hierarchically organized, then they can easily include partial page rendering URLs for integration with external websites without having to add any extra configurations for HST SiteMapItems and HST Pages.

SubPath Delimiter Configuration

By default, the subPath delimiter is set to "./" for good reasons. The default configuration are safer than any other choices in most cases. However, if you need to customize the subPath delimiter for some reason, you may add and customize the following property in /WEB-INF/hst-config.properties:

container.request.path.suffix.delimiter = ./