If you’ve worked with Content Server’s Smart View before, you know it offers a newly redesigned structured way to present content, but it comes with some significant limitations—especially when it comes to customization, flexibility, and widget interactions.
That’s where Ravenblack Dynamic Widgets come in. Our solution makes Smart View more dynamic, customizable, and efficient, but without the headaches of complex and burdensome development.
Let’s start by looking at the key challenges users face with Smart View today.Presumably you may be considering an increased use of the Smart View interface for your users. Obviously some functionality is not available in Smart View, but even for simple use cases, you may still be using classic Content Server to adapt to your business requirements. Do any of these statements resonate with your company experience?
1. You need to modify and extend Smart View pages and widget functionality to meet business requirements, but you are still using classic Content Server because it is easier to configure to your needs. In our experience, organizations almost always need some level of customization of the Smart View for it to be adopted successfully by its users. Over the years, customers have used tools such as WebReports to do this.
2. You think (or have found) the Smart View SDK is difficult to learn. You’re not wrong—customization is difficult. While Smart View has a Software Development Kit (SDK), it’s complicated to set up a development environment, and difficult to learn unless you've already worked with similar Javascript frameworks. This makes tailoring widgets to specific business needs a challenge.
3. You try to use WebReports widgets to achieve your aims. Many customers turn to WebReports widgets as an easier alternative to the SDK, particularly as they are familiar to many of their developers or business users.
4. You find that you have to work around various limitations with WebReports widgets and that you typically settle for sub-standard interfaces, or you need elaborate kludgey workarounds to succeed. Many customers have existing skills with WebReports on classic Content Server so naturally the ability to surface custom content in widgets with WebReports seems like a good start, however, even that approach has some frustrating limitations as noted further on in this blog.
Perhaps you can answer no to some of these, but for most customers and companies who work with Content Server, you’ve most likely answered yes to all.
The WebReports widget-based solution has become a very popular go-to for customers, but it was originally designed to be a relatively passive, non-interactive feature to allow custom content to be surfaced on a page. As such, it doesn't quite meet the rich functionality of WebReports (and ActiveViews) in a classic environment. Specifically, these are some of the limitations:
Here’s a typical use case that sums up many of these issues.
The customer wants to implement a fairly unique set of filters to initiate a custom search. The various filters are fed dynamically based on sub-tables. Having selected appropriate filters, the user wants to click a search button, and then see the results.
Challenges
Where will the widget display the results? The most common approach is to set the widget as a full page, with half of the page showing the filter screen and half of the page showing the results. This may require some nested iFrames or complex logic to manage the search and displaying the results. In addition, both the filter section and the results section are poorly implemented—either too large or too small, and if the user requires any other standard widgets to exist on the same page, these other widgets are likely not visible without significant scrolling. In summary, you can create unique, custom content, but you have no control over the framework/palette available to render that content, once the page is loaded.
Ravenblack Dynamic Widgets introduce a brand new widget type combined with a rich set of JavaScript functions built around a framework explicitly designed to work in the Smart View environment.
These features combined, remove all of these limitations, and actually add new development capability that is not available with conventional WebReport widgets.
With very granular control, any developer can perform multiple actions in response to any application events or program functions. We’ve built a custom API that provides the ability to control the widget in several different ways at any time during and after the page loads. Specifically you can:
And for the first time, widgets can communicate with each other seamlessly, thanks to a central registry that eliminates naming conflicts and loading order issues.
The best part? It’s simple to install and use.
And we’re not stopping there. Future updates will include:
So, if you’ve ever struggled with Smart View’s limitations, Ravenblack Dynamic Widgets are here to help. They make customization easier, interfaces cleaner, and widgets smarter. And best of all we provide detailed documentation and multiple packaged examples to help get you started. We’ll be publishing videos of these demos along with example use cases. In the meantime, here's a short overview if you'd like to see Dynamic Widgets in action:
We’re always improving our products based on user feedback, so let us know what you think, and please share some of your problem use cases!