Introduction
Narratives are meant to be made highly dynamic, however, before making your Narrative dynamic, it is recommended to do a static Narrative first and to test that it works and is rendered visually correctly in your front-end.
We recommend you to start with a document with the designed of mock-up layouts you want to do and to indicate in this document what are the Layout Blocks (for example by drawing boxes around) and indicating the name of the layout block every time, as a result, you will have a layout like below, then you can directly indicates what should be the possible configuration parameters of each block. This will be a great Specification Document for the Integration Team!
Before you can start configuring your Narratives, you need first to declare all your Layout Blocks, please check the information here : https://boxalino.atlassian.net/wiki/spaces/BPKB/pages/edit-v2/26509390
For example, if you want to create a Narrative with this layout, you will need to define 4 Layout Blocks:
Title
Banner
Product Slider
Product
You can create exactly such a Layout as a static Narrative with dummy test content. This way, you can fully test your front-end and adjust it as you want. When you are finished, you can then modify your Narrative to become dynamic.
We recommend you to keep a static narrative copy, so you can easily make modifications in the future, without having to work with a more complex dynamically configured narrative. You can do that by having your static narrative connected to another widget you use only for testing or by connecting to the same widget, but adding a context (for example: checking the value of a request parameter) so that the static narrative is used when this parameter is set in your API request.
Step 1: Create your Narrative TPO Widget
Every Narrative is connected to a TPO widget. This way, when you make your call to the Boxalino Narrative API you can indicate the widget you would like to retrieve your Narrative from.
You can create a widget without any special strategy simply by following the guide : How to add a new TPO Widget
As you will create a widget for a Narrative, make sure to select one of the 3rd line TPO : PRESENT, TELL OR PERSUADE as described in the How the above How to link.
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