Mashup Builder Terminology

This section describes the most important terms and concepts in Mashup Builder.

Note: All throughout the application, you can hover over the ‘i’ information icons to display tooltip descriptions.

See Also
Creating Composite Widgets
Adding Feeds
Adding Widgets
Adding Triggers
Appendix - Mashup Expression Language
  • CloudView Administration Console is the main interface for configuring data sources, indexing options and search processes in the Exalead CloudView platform. To access, go to the product’s BASEPORT+ 1 (for example, if the installation is at http://host:10000, admin will be at http://host:10001/admin). Log in with the user app-admin and password exalead.

  • Composite widgets can be created with the standard widget library to handle very specific needs. Your new composite widgets are added to the Widgets > Composite Widgets group. They can then be reused as any other widget on any page of your application. Updating a composite widget updates all its instances at once, which is useful when the same widgets are repeated on every page (for example, menus, headers, etc.).

  • Facets are used to narrow search results. Use them to drill-down into an area, such as language, author, or file type. They are typically used in dashboard analytics widgets, or in the Refinements panel for enterprise search.

  • Feeds are generic content fetchers for heterogeneous sources. The Mashup API retrieves and searches hits from feeds and returns the results in standard Atom format. Feeds can also be enriched using nested and/or parallel requests.
  • Mashup API is the API which retrieves the contents of data sources to make them accessible to the data feeds. Note that Mashup Builder Premium also uses other APIs for non-Exalead CloudView feeds (for example, FlickR search).
  • Mashup UI is the search front-end of the Exalead CloudView solution.

  • MEL Functions (Mashup Expression Language) are dynamic variable expressions which allow you to construct text that contains dynamic content from your feeds, for example, ${feeds["persons"].metas["name"]}. These expressions provide much more than just dynamic variables and support common operations that would usually require editing JSP files.

  • Triggers can be added to the applications created with a Mashup Builder Premium instance. They allow you to launch specific actions and alter the default behavior of feeds, widgets and pages.

  • Widgets are the graphic components which build up the Mashup Builder. There are widgets for:

    • Creating search forms

    • Displaying search results in different forms (lists, tables, charts, maps...)

    • Controlling search refinements (facets)

    For complete widget descriptions, see the Widget Reference.