National Cancer Institute PDQ Database Integration

Owned by Zachary Restifo
Mar 09, 2021
3 min read

The school has built an integration with the National Cancer Institute's PDQ database, a comprehensive database with summaries of thousands of cancer topics.

  • Data files from NCI's database are downloaded and deployed to the School of Medicine's servers on a nightly basis, ensuring its websites have the most up-to-date NCI content.

  • This is an automated process, and once setup on a site the content and links to the summary information are automatically maintained.

The following instructions provide information on integrating the NCI PDQ Database with a page via Tridion.

 

Table of Contents

 

 

Creating an NCI Listing Component

Before integrating the NCI PDQ Database with your page, you must create an NCI Listing component.

Click New Component (blue) to begin creating an NCI Listing component.

 

In the Building Blocks folder of your respective website, click New Component (highlighted in blue above) in the Create tab (highlighted in yellow above) of the navigation bar.

You will be taken to a new page for creating the component (shown below):

 

Creating an NCI Listing component.

 

  1. Enter an appropriate Name for your component.

  2. Choose NCI Listing from the Schema drop down menu (highlighted in yellow above).

  3. In the Title field, enter an appropriate title for the type of content you will be displaying on the page.

  4. Select the blue Topic IDs link (highlighted in blue above).

    • From the list you are directed to, select as many topics as you like.

  5. Once you have entered all of your Topic IDs, Save & Close your component.

Once you have saved the component, you are ready to add the feed to a page.

 

Adding the NCI Listing Component to a Page

After creating the NCI Listing component, you can add the component to a page.

  1. Navigate in the Root folder to the page you'd like to add NCI Integration to and double-click to open the page.

  2. In the window that opens, click the Component Presentations tab.

  3. Click Insert at the bottom left of the page window.

  4. Browse to the NCI Listing component you created and click to select it.

  5. From the Component Template dropdown, select the NCI Summary template.

  6. Click the Insert button at the bottom right, then the Close button.

  7. Save and Close the page, then publish the page.

  8. Create a new page in the same directory with the name "NCI Summary" and the file name "info".

  9. Insert the same NCI Listing component you created in the last section using the NCI Summary component template.

  10. Save and Close, then Publish the new page.

 

Example of NCI Integration on a Page

The below screenshot shows an example of NCI Integration on a page:

 

The NCI Summary template provides a short summary of the information, as well as links to the pages with the full information.