Smart Link defined
By default, a SmartLink is a client side script which shows or hides a link based on its status in ICE Portal. If a brochure is enabled the link would be displayed in the browser, if not – it will not be displayed.

Do I have to use ICE Portal implementation of Smart Link?
The requirement is that before you use a brochure link on your web site you must verify that this brochure is available. The default SmartLink provided for each brochure is a standard way of doing that but there are other ways this can be done on the client as well as on the server.

I don’t want to use client side script provided. How else I can implement SmartLink?
First do a GET on verification link:

http://www.iceportal.com/ice/WTVPortal/Pages/
BrochureView/BrochureAvailable.aspx?did=XXX&
brochureid=YYY where XXX is your distributor ID and YYY is the ID of the brochure you want to link to.

If a brochure is available you will get a gif image of size 1x1 pixel. In this case you can show the link to the brochure as you have verified its availability.

If the response is anything else the brochure is not available. In this case you should not display a link to the brochure as this link will not work.

I want to have a links to multiple brochures (from ICE Portal) on my web page? Can I copy and paste the client script for one of them and then just copy it over and over modifying brochure IDs only?

Yes. Make sure you change IDs not only in the brochure URLs but also for the name of the images loaded to verify brochure availability. If you keep the image name the same it will not work correctly as all the links in the list will be checking availability against this image instead of checking availability against its own image.

How can I implement SmartLinks correctly on the server side?
There are many server side technologies so we are not able to list solutions for all of them here.

The general concept is:
1) Make a server to server call with GET on
    brochure verification URL with correct
    Distributor and Brochure ID
2) If you get a valid response from the call (gif
    image of size 1 pixel) write out HTML with the     link of the brochure you just verified.
3) If you don’t get a valid response – do not write     out HTML to show the link of this brochure as it     will not be functional.

Why should I only look for valid response from verification link?
Always check for valid response because it is the only time when you are guaranteed that this is when the brochure link is going to be functional. There may be a number of invalid responses and if you only check for one you may show a link to brochure when it is actually not available.

What other ways I can use to verify brochure status before displaying brochure link on my Website?
You can use XML interfaces exposed by ICE Portal.

This is too complex. What can I do to have brochures on my site?
If you do not feel comfortable implementing smart links on your Website a software engineer from ICE Portal can do this for you for an additional fee. Please contact support@iceportal.com for more details.