Aspects 
The aspect of a PCD lookup is an environment variable that specifies the type of object that should be returned when performing a PCD lookup.
For example, when looking up a page, you may want to return an IPage object, which contains methods related to a page, such as for adding iViews to the page or setting the layout. Instead, you may want an IAttributeSet, which provides a generic interface that provides access to all the administrative attributes of the page, whether they are defined in the PCD or elsewhere.
The aspect is set with the com.sap.portal.directory.Constants.REQUESTED_ASPECT environment variable. It is up to the object provider for the type of object that is requested to read this value and return an appropriate object.
Note
The value of the REQUESTED_ASPECT constant is com.sap.portal.jndi.requested_aspect. You can specify it with a string, and thereby not need a reference to jndisupport.jar
The following table shows the available aspects, and the interfaces that are returned for each:
Aspect |
Value of Environment Variable |
Object Types Returned |
|---|---|---|
Semantic |
PcmConstants.ASPECT_SEMANTICS |
IiView IPage ILayout ISystem |
Administration |
PcmConstants.ASPECT_ADMINISTRATION |
IAdminBase From the IAdminBase interface, you can also derive the following interfaces with the getImplementation() method: ICatalogNode IPermission IAttributeSet |
Persistence |
IPcdAttribute.PERSISTENCY_ASPECT |
IPcdContext |
If no aspect is specified or an aspect is not recognized by an object factory, the object factory returns the default object. For folders, this is an IPcdContext; for semantic objects, this is the Java semantic object.