People’s tasks often involve making choices: which shirt to wear, what to eat for breakfast, or what profile picture to use. The power of choice is a terrific privilege, but the means by which a person makes his/her selection can make an experience good or bad. Here are some factors that influence the experience:
- Item organization
- Consistency
- UI intuitiveness
Liferay DXP’s Item Selector provides all these things. It is a UI component that enables users to select entities in a consistent easy-to-use manner. Many Liferay portlets, such as Documents and Media, Web Content, Blogs and more, use Item Selectors for selecting things such as images, videos, audio files, documents, and pages.
Figure 1: Item Selectors let users browse and select different kinds of entities.
The Item Selector API provides a framework for developers to use and extend Item Selectors. They can add Item Selectors to their apps, customize Liferay DXP’s Item Selectors, and create Item Selectors to select any kind of entity.
Selection views are the framework’s key components. In an Item Selector, selection views show entities of particular types from different sources.
For example, an Item Selector configured to show images might show selection views from the following sources:
- Documents and Media
- Third-party image provider
- Drag-and-drop interface
Here are some different Item Selector use cases:
-
Enabling your application to select Liferay DXP entities such as sites, pages, or documents from Documents and Media.
-
Customizing a selection experience by adding a new selection view for an entity (e.g., a view of images from an external image repository).
-
Creating new selectable entities for other applications to use in their Item Selectors.
This group of tutorials demonstrates how to satisfy these use cases.