IBM Connections Profile tag customization

Aug 02 2011 Published by under IBM Connections, Lotus Connections

We have been creating a custom IBM Connection’s widget for a client that allows a user to upload a series of predefined tags to their (or someone else’s) profile. This in effect gives the user a catalogue of tags to choose from that are broken into sections, allowing them to rapidly populate their profile with tags that have meaning across the organisation. A couple of things came up as part of this development, firstly, what is the format of the ATOM message that is required?

To save you from using the help, what you need to do is upload the entire tags for the user, which means that if you want to add a single tag, you need to download the existing tags and add the additional tags to the list. The format of the ATOM file that needs to be sent is as follows (note this needs to be sent as a HTTP PUT):

1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8

<categories xmlns="http://www.w3.org/2007/app" xmlns:atom="http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom" xmlns:snx="http://www.ibm.com/xmlns/prod/ns">
<atom:category term="arabic"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="english"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="french"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="italian"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="mandarin"></atom:category>
<atom:category term="other language"></atom:category>
</categories>

This seems to work a treat in the testing that I have done so far. One interesting point to note is that this method of updating the tags allows you to insert tags into a profile that includes spaces – see the “other language” value above. This appears to work in the backend as well because it renders properly in the tags widget:

Profile Tags

If you would like to discuss customizing your IBM Connections implementing using widgets, then please email me at [email protected] for more information.

Tags: , ,

4 responses so far

  • pierre milcent

    Hi,
    another good proposal for customer is to have a parser working on job role and extract main word (removing articles) to creat a list of tags representing the job.
    We’ve done this when injecting a list of users in a platform test, based on a spreadsheet with fisrtname, name, job role, phone number …
    We used Excel macro to parse the job role, create tags and add them with the TDI process creating users.
    This is very helpfull to start enriching profiles.

    • Michael Ransley

      That is a great idea, I assume that you are talking about pre-loading the tags for a user.

      Anything that can be done to make the profiles richer is a great bonus.

  • Rishab Sharma

    Hi Michael,

    Was wondering if you can have a hierarchy of tags..Lets say we say English language..then Grammar..then say..So the idea is to build something like a organization hierarchy of tags..I hope i am clear..

    • Michael Ransley

      The tags themselves do not lend to a hierarchy but I produced a customization for a client that provided a customizable category for the tags. This was done by providing a series of dropdowns, where the first drop down was the category such as language and the second provided the values – English, French, German, Japanese etc.

      The advantage of this approach is that it directs the user to populate the tags rather than them being presented with a list of the most popular tags.