The term cooperative portlets refers to the capability of portlets on a page to interact with each other by sharing information.
One or more cooperative portlets on a portal page can automatically react to changes from a source portlet triggered by an action or event in the source portlet. A source portlet is the sender of information that will be consumed and processed by a target or receiving portlet. Portlets that are targets or receivers of the piece of information can process the information and react by displaying the appropriate information in their portlet content area. Cooperation between source and target portlets is facilitated by a WebSphere® Portal runtime entity called the property broker.
Portlets on a page can cooperate in this way even if they were developed independently and are part of different applications. The only requirement for this to work is both the sender portlet and the receiver portlet of a piece of information need to be on the same portal page, and be set up to handle the same type of information. By default a manual action is required for source portlet information to be sent to a target portlet. This manual action is called Click To Action (C2A). If an automatic sending of the information is desired, the portlets can be "wired" together. An administrator can do the wiring by using the IBM® Wiring portlet. In this scenario, the piece of information will automatically flow to the correct receiving portlet when an action is taken in the source portlet. End users or administrators can also wire two portlets together by holding down the CTRL key while clicking on the Action icon on the source portlet. This source-target relationship will be honored until a user holds down the CTRL key and clicks on the Action icon a second time.
iSeries™ Access for Web's portal functionality includes multiple cooperative portlets. The functional areas containing cooperative portlets include: Database, File, and Print. See the detailed information in these sections to determine which portlets work together to provide a more advanced set of functionality.