Personalization Overview
SDL LiveContent Reach is capable of personalizing content for your end users based on their language, configuration, or context. This filtering relies on the source data to contain filtering tags and attributes, and relies on the end user setting filtering conditions either through a user interface or through the API. Each user on the system is able to establish their own individual personalization context, which lasts throughout the users session.
The following describes the process by which content is filtered within SDL LiveContent Reach:
- When a user first accesses SDL LiveContent Reach, no filtering conditions are set. Therefore, no filtering of content occurs. All content is rendered and displayed to the user. If no filtering conditions are set, SDL LiveContent Reach uses an aggressive caching model to provide the content as quickly as possible to the end users.
- The user may interact with a filtering interface to define their conditions by completing a form, or choosing selections from a drop-down. It is also possible that by using the API, the filtering conditions can be set automatically. This might be set by a link from another site that redirects the user into SDL LiveContent Reach, and sets the filtering conditions at the same time, based on their location within the external site. Note that filtering conditions are set on a publication by publication basis as opposed to across the entire application. However, filtering conditions set on one language version of a publication (such as English) of a publication automatically apply to other language versions (such as German and Japanese).
- Once filtering conditions have been set, SDL LiveContent Reach engages filtering across all of the content for a publication. This includes the table of contents, index term list, documents, and all of the different rendering formats such as HTML and PDF.
- SDL LiveContent Reach applies filtering by transforming content via the LiveContent_home/db/LiveContent/ui/skins/<your skin>/xsl/<your standard>/filter.xsl before it is rendered to its final output (such as HTML, PDF). This XSL is responsible for removing unnecessary content and returning an XML instance. This XML instance is then passed to the XSL responsible for formatting (such as html.xsl or pdf.xsl).