Adding Pulse Feed to Document Overview Page (Open Text Content Server 10)

Published in

Driver Lane

4 min readJan 7, 2011

One of the interesting new modules which have been released for Open Text Content Server is the Pulse module.

What it attempts to do is to add some social sensibilities (Web 2.0) to a product that at the time it was introduced was just coming out of the nested tables and spacer gif approach to web interface development (p.s. great for screen readers). This module was first released for Content Server 9.7.1 and it is now available to Content Server 10, For those not familiar with Content Server 10 , you should pop over to Greg Griffith’s website for a review of the product.

The issue is the sidebar

One of the thing that the new version of Content Server introduces is a concept of faceted browsing. This allows for an alternative way for you to disseminate your content on different types of meta-data (very similar to the way that Virtual Folders module did it within Content Server 9.7.1 in some respects).

Now all this is well and good, and the interface sidebar works great. however it would appear with the installation of the Pulse module that sidebar is starting to get pretty crowded. I can see that part of the interface getting crowded.

Enter the Document Overview page

A Simple Change

The change we are making is a small one lets me clear. However screwing this up has large consequences, I think it is safe to say that changes like this should not be taken likely as they alter the nature that the application’s behavior. Two key things to keep in mind when we are doing these things:

What we are doing here is not supported by the vendor (in practice best efforts will be made if you got into real trouble, but it would more than likely revert back to the original files).
This change may hurt your upgrade path (because we are playing with a core module, it may get overwritten by a patch or a new module).

Now that I have completed my safety announcement we can commence with the breaking of Content Server.

Before you make any changes to be sure to STOP the Content Server services (both of them)

Locate the File

With Content Server stopped, browse to the following folder::

[OTHOME]\module\webdoc_10_0_0\html\

[OTHOME] is the location of the of the Content Server application e.g. C:\OpenText

Backup the File

Within this folder there will be a document called overview.html. This is the document that we are going to be editing, take a back up this file (copy and paste it to another location…where you know you can find it)

Edit the File

Now with the version of Pulse module for Content Server 10 they have created some weblingo to help embed the pulse feed for a document into other places (other than the side bar).

Open the overview.html in Notepad (or some other text editor), and you will need to search for:

 <! — Bottom section — !>

Above that line you will need to add the following line:


 ;;call <.Module( ‘socialfeed’ ).HtmlPrefix() + “pulsecomments.html” >( .fPrgCtx, webNodeRec )

Save the file and then restart the Content Server services

Display and test.

Now when you go to the document overview page you should see the Pulse feed for the document listed underneath a document.

Document Overview page with Pulse Feed

Finally, it is always a good idea to test to see if everything is working (check you can still open documents and view properties from this page).

Clean up

Now that you have added the Pulse feed for the document on the Document Overview page you can now disable the Pulse feed from the side bar (option within the admin pages).

So what is next?

This whole exercise has wet my whistle with regards to the document overview page. The next trick I believe will be for me in my spare time to go to work to get ride of those pesky nested tables….this as much as a proof to myself, but also as a guide to what is possible if you have some free time and you want to increase your users experience.

Ultimately the goal is to get the document overview page to the its stated goal. That is a page where you can get a complete overview of the document (Metadata and all).

Finally a thank you to Brad Bosley from OT on the tip on the OT communities website

Originally published at anvilation.com on January 7, 2011.