I doubt this will be of much use to people as I built something interesting on a dying technology. Oracle will be replacing the publisher functionality with tools from the UCM stack, I think Site Studio specifically. But now for the regularly scheduled program…

My first challenge as a developer was getting in the mindset that publisher is simply a publishing engine that leverages templates. While much of the content seems dynamic when you are creating presentation templates using the PCS tags, it is really just running the data through the engine and creating html. My reason for attempting this is that I am trying to paginate the archive page of your standard news template in ALUI. This portlet template creates a main portlet, which shows the first X number of articles, and a link to an archive page that shows all the articles.

So after coming to terms with this eliminated your standard paging method of chunking data and going back to the source for data as needed, I came up with these approaches:

1. Dynamically create a series of pages that are chunked based on some arbitrary break point like items per page, or a time interval and create links to the different pages.
2. To pull back all the data and use JavaScript and dhtml to handle the displaying of the chunks.

I choose method number 2, since it seemed a little easier and the performance is better after the hit for the original load. This solution requires you to edit all three objects associated with your index.html file.

First, you’ll be adding a new integer property called maxitems to your Data Entry Template.

Second, you’ll be setting a value for the new maxitems property in your Content Item

Finally, you’ll be adding pcs tags and JavaScript to your presentation template to handle the pagination, which will be sized on the property you set in the content item.


..
normal foreach loop over items
..
<pcs:if expr="(( item_position - 1 ) % maxitems ) == 0">
</div>
</pcs:if>
<pcs:if expr="(item_position == 1) &or; (((item_position - 1) % maxitems ) == 0)">
<div style="display:none" class="news" id="page<pcs:value expr="item_position"></pcs:value>">
<script language=javascript>
divcount++;
</script>
</pcs:if>
..
Your Normal Content Announcement Stuff Goes Here
..
After you close the foreach loop for items. Insert the following to create pagination links.
..
<pcs:if expr="items.length &gt; maxitems">
<pcs:foreach var="item" expr="filter(items, 'filtered.published &and; !filtered.hidden')">
<!-- <pcs:value expr="item_position"></pcs:value> -->
<pcs:if expr="(item_position == 1) &or; (((item_position - 1) % maxitems ) == 0) ">
<a href="javascript:showDiv(<pcs:value expr="item_position"></pcs:value>);">
<pcs:value expr="item_position"></pcs:value> - <pcs:value expr="item_position + 9"></pcs:value>
</a>
&nbsp;&nbsp;
</pcs:if>
</pcs:foreach>
</pcs:if>
<script language=javascript>
document.getElementById("page1").style.display="";
function showDiv(page){
for (x=1;x<=divcount*<pcs:value expr="maxitems"></pcs:value>;x+=<pcs:value expr="maxitems"></pcs:value>){
document.getElementById("page" + x).style.display="none";
}
document.getElementById("page" + page).style.display="";
}
</script>

After you publish your content item again, you should only see the first section of the page, and links to other sections. This is accomplished by creating hidden divs labeled page1, page1+maxitems, etc. When the page is rendered in a browser, the script at the bottom shows the first section, and updated the visible section when the JavaScript links are clicked.

I am in the process of updating the links to end at the last number and not a rounded amount based on max items. You can consider making this change as homework since it will show you understand how this actually works and some of the publisher nuances.

Eventually, I would like to combine to chunk up big sections onto different pages, and then use JavaScript to page through the smaller chunks on each page. This would limit the cost of the original load, while getting the flexibility and performance of JavaScript