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<!DOCTYPE document PUBLIC "-//APACHE//DTD Documentation V1.0//EN" "../../dtd/document-v10.dtd">
<document>
<header>
<title>How to use Cocoon WebMail Site</title>
<version>0.9</version>
<type>Technical document</type>
<authors>
<person name="Bernhard Huber" email="huber.at.apache.org"/>
</authors>
<abstract>This document describes Cocoon WebMail.</abstract>
</header>
<body>
<s1 title="Cocoon WebMail Site">
<p>
This document describes the Cocoon WebMail Site.
The overview section describes the URI space, layout and
resource mapping used by
Cocoon WebMail Site.
</p>
<p>
The next sections describes the Cocoon sitemap components
used in the Cocoon WebMail Site.
</p>
<p>
The target audience of this document are sitemap designer, and
developers interested in setting up a Cocoon WebMail Site.
</p>
</s1>
<s1 title="Overview">
<s2 title="URI Space">
<p>
The URI space has following structure, <em>root</em> denotes the root
of this URI space.
</p>
<figure alt="URI space" src="asciiart/uri-space.jpg"/>
<p>
As you may figure out <code>*.html</code> serves static document pages,
mail/mail.html, and mail/logout.html serves dynamic Cocoon Webmail pages.
All other resources are static, like images, cascaded stylesheet, and icons.
The <code>asciiart/*.jpg</code> are jpg resource created from simple ascii art text.
</p>
<p>
The document pages all have the format <code>*.html</code>,
eg. <code>index.html</code>, or <code>howto-cocoon-webmail.html</code>.
The dynamic Cocoon Webmail pages all have the format <code>mail/*.html</code>,
eg. <code>mail/maill.html</code>, or <code>mail/logout.html</code>.
</p>
</s2>
<s2 title="Layout">
<p>
The visible layout of Cocoon Webmail Site is a simple multi column
layout.
</p>
<figure alt="Layout" src="asciiart/layout.jpg"/>
<p>
The sections contain following piece of information
</p>
<ul>
<li>
The header section displays the Cocoon Webmail banner;
the top section is empty for document pages, for
dynamic pages it contains a list of available commands.
</li>
<li>
The col1 section presents auxilliary information.
</li>
<li>
The col2 section contains for document pages the document content;
for dynamic pages it presents the content of an executed command,
like a list of mail folders, a list of messages, the content of a message.
</li>
<li>
The col3 section presents additional links.
</li>
<li>
Finally the bottom section displays the Cocoon Webmail footer.
</li>
</ul>
<s3 title="Implementing the Layout">
<p>
For the sake of flexibilty a page requested by an URI is aggregated.
The aggregation parts are located in the resource section directories.
</p>
<p>
The column layout is realized by using positioning features of CSS. Each aggregation
part is wrapped by an &lt;div&gt; which has CSS positional settings for placing
it some concrete page position.
</p>
</s3>
</s2>
<s2 title="Resource Mapping">
<p>
The Cocoon Webmail Site uses following directory structure
on the filesystem:
</p>
<figure alt="Directory structure" src="asciiart/directory-hierarchy.jpg"/>
<p>
As you can figure out each layout section is mapped to a directory. Each of these
directories contains the documents of one section.
</p>
<p>
Thus for example the request URI of this page is <code>howto-cocoon-webmail.html</code>.
The <code>mid-col-2</code> section of this page expects an xml document
in the filesystem as <code>docs/mid-col-2/howto-cocoon-webmail.xml</code>.
</p>
<p>
By design dynamic pages of the Cocoon Webmail application are
requested by an URI of the format <code>mail/*.html</code>, the resource mapping
of these pages maps to the same directories as the static pages.
Thus <code>mail/mail.html</code> maps for the section <code>mid-col-2</code> to
<code>docs/mid-col-2/mail.xsp</code>.
</p>
</s2>
</s1>
<s1 title="Cocoon's Sitemap Elements">
<p>
Beside the usage of the sitemap <code>MailAction</code> there are several sitemap
components, and sitemap constructs used in sitemap of the Cocoon Webmail.
</p>
<p>
The following sections detail most important Cocoon's sitemap components
of Cocoon WebMail. All of these components are listed in the
sitemap componts section.
</p>
<s2 title="Actions">
<ul>
<li>resource-exists - Checks existance of a resource</li>
<li>link-translator - Defines link rewriting patterns</li>
<li>mail - action of the Cocoon Webmail application, executes commands, manages
http session, and javamail session.
</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<s2 title="Generators">
<ul>
<li>file - generates XML from an XML file</li>
<li>serverpages - generates XML from an XSP file</li>
<li>asciiart-svg - generates SVG from a TXT file</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<s2 title="Matchers">
<ul>
<li>wildcard - matches simple wildcard of the format <code>*</code>, and <code>**</code></li>
<li>regexp-default - extension of regexp matcher for setting default values.
It is used to for matching both paginated, and non-paginted URI request.
Setting the default paginator page to 1.
</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<s2 title="Readers">
<ul>
<li>resource - simple resource reader for serving images, and CSS files</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<s2 title="Selectors">
<ul>
<li>request-attribute - selects processing depending on the existance, and content
of a request attribute, selects the suitable XSLT stylesheet for javamail object
to document page transformation.
</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<s2 title="Transformers">
<ul>
<li>xslt - XSLT transformer for transforming aggregated site document to html,
transforming javamail documents to a document.
</li>
<li>paginator - Paginator transformer for splitting up long pages,
separating document pages by <code>pagesheets/htmlpages.xml</code>, and
separating dynamic pages by <code>pagesheets/mailhtmlpages.xml</code>,
</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<s2 title="Views">
<ul>
<li>content - defines a view requesting the 'pure' content of a page.</li>
<li>links - defines a view for requesting all outbounding links of a page.</li>
</ul>
</s2>
<s2 title="Resources">
<ul>
<li>show-page - aggregates a requested URI, triggering the generation of its parts.
The sections making up the content of a page are invoked from here.
</li>
<li>load-page - Decides what page file should get loaded, due to the existing
of a resource in the filesystem, serving default pages in case of non-existance
of a requested resource document.
</li>
<li>show-page-xsp - Decides what page file should get loaded, due to the existing
of a resource in the filesystem, serving default pages in case of non-existance
of a requested resource document. It generates from XSP instead of XML, in
contrast to <code>load-page</code>.
</li>
</ul>
</s2>
</s1>
<s1 title="Serving a Document Page">
<p>
Each requested document URI uses following sitemap data flow:
</p>
<figure alt="serving document page" src="asciiart/serving-document-page.jpg"/>
<p>
Each aggregate part follows in principal following sitemap data flow:
</p>
<figure alt="serving document detail" src="asciiart/serving-document-page-1.jpg"/>
</s1>
<s1 title="Serving a Dynamic Page">
<p>
Each requested dynamic URI uses following sitemap data flow:
</p>
<figure alt="serving dynamic page" src="asciiart/serving-dynamic-page.jpg"/>
<p>
Each aggregate part follows in principal following sitemap data flow:
</p>
<figure alt="serving dynamic page detail" src="asciiart/serving-dynamic-page-1.jpg"/>
</s1>
<s1 title="MailAction Dataflow">
<p>
As <code>MailAction</code> access a lot of parameters
the following diagram gives an overview of all
parameters involved for processing a request.
</p>
<figure alt="MailAction Dataflow" src="asciiart/mailaction-dataflow.jpg"/>
</s1>
<s1 title="Summary">
<p>
As the basic structure of Cocoon WebMail Site has been explained,
setting up, and maintaing a Cocoon WebMail site
- reusing ideas, sitemap snippets, and Cocoon's sitemap components -
shall be easy.
</p>
</s1>
</body>
</document>