In this article I will describe how to display a list of “My Communities” in an XPage. To do this I will have to create an ArrayList of communities and use a repeat control in an XPage to display them.

Getting My Communities

As I showed in this previous blog post there were some interesting issues in setting up the managed beans for getting the communities out of connections/smartcloud.

But in quick review this is the code for getting my communities.

package com.xomino.sbt;

import java.util.Collection;
import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;

import com.ibm.sbt.services.client.ClientServicesException;
import com.ibm.sbt.services.client.connections.communities.Community;
import com.ibm.sbt.services.client.connections.communities.CommunityList;
import com.ibm.sbt.services.client.connections.communities.CommunityService;
import com.ibm.sbt.services.client.connections.communities.CommunityServiceException;
import com.ibm.sbt.services.endpoints.Endpoint;
import com.ibm.xsp.extlib.util.ExtLibUtil;

public class Utils {

	public static void checkAuthentication() throws ClientServicesException{
		Endpoint theEndpoint = getEndpoint();
		if (!theEndpoint.isAuthenticated()){
			theEndpoint.authenticate(true);
		}
	}

	public static Endpoint getEndpoint(){
		Endpoint endpoint = (Endpoint) ExtLibUtil.resolveVariable(FacesContext.getCurrentInstance(), "smartcloud");
		return endpoint;
	}

	public static Collection<Community> getCommunities() throws CommunityServiceException{
		CommunityService svc = new CommunityService();
		CommunityList communities = svc.getMyCommunities();
		return communities;
	}
}

What is interesting is that the svc.getMyCommunities() returns a “Collection” and the code assist not only told me this, but it changed the return of the method “Collection” and added the import java.util.Collection.

So that is all well and good – but then how do I get that only my XPage?

Well I actually used the JavaDoc !

So then in the XPage I used a repeat control to iterate through the “collection”

<xp:repeat id="repeat2" rows="30"
	value="#{javascript:com.xomino.sbt.Utils.getCommunities()}" var="myCommunities">
	<xp:div styleClass="readonly" disableTheme="true">
		<xp:text disableTheme="true">
		  <xp:this.value><![CDATA[#{javascript:myCommunities.getTitle()}]]></xp:this.value>
		 </xp:text>
	</xp:div>
</xp:repeat>

and there we have it.

So what is a Collection exactly? I guess I ought to find out……