Umlaut partial html API javascript helper

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Revision as of 19:32, 2 October 2008 by 128.220.159.25 (Talk)

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If you want to include Umlaut-generated HTML directly on a third party page via javascript, there is a javascript helper script to make that very easy. This helper uses the Umlaut partial HTML api, but does everything for you. The helper will update your divs, and keep polling Umlaut for new results, continuing to re-update your divs until Umlaut is finished. How often it polls is configured by application config 'poll_wait_seconds', which defaults to 4.

You need to specify your Umlaut base URL in a global javascript variable. This is not your link resolver base url which for Umlaut ends in /resolve, but the actual Umlaut application base URL, which should be the same, without the /resolve. At JHU, it's "http://findit.library.jhu.edu".

You then specify mappings from Umlaut html sections to HTML divs on your page. Umlaut html sections are configured in Umlaut in the "partial_html_map" configuration param, which by default is set to the "bg_update_map" config params :divs key. To see the sections in a default Umlaut installation, see: environment.rb in svn, look for bg_update_map. The :divs key of the hash there is an array of hashes, each individual hash has a :div_id key that corresponds to the html_sections id in this api response. For Umlaut developers, the :partial key tells you what Rails partial is used to generate this section.

You can also optionally use some javascript callbacks to perform behavior after or during loading. In the following example, we'll demo using a javascript callback to only show a div for search_inside functionality if there are search_inside tools provided.

The umlaut_embed.js script will check if the javascript Prototype library is loaded into the host page, and load it if not. Among other things, this means you can use Prototype in your callbacks.

An example is best: