Personalization in XperienCentral depends on a number of things:

The HTML of the page
The XML containing session and request information
The XSL used to reformat the page based on personalization expressions

These three are combined on the server side, which results in plain HTML being sent out to the visitor of the website.

It is possible to view the combined XML of the page and session information. Based on this XML you can create your own personalization expressions. To see the XML, add the parameter xmldebug=true to the URL of the page. You will have to request the page on the backend server and you have to be logged in with the Tomcat Administrative Login to get access. For example:

http://<backend>/web/show/id=123456?xmldebug=true

With the latest Tomcat versions you may have some difficulty using the tool. To be able to use the ssidebug or xmldebug tools, follow these steps:

Open the URL http://<backend server name>/web/admin/status.
Log in with the proper credentials
Verify that you see the Status page.
Open the URL http://<backend server name>/web/show/id=...?xmldebug=true.

The above URL would return something like:

<root>
    <system>
        <cookies>
            <cookie>
                <name>__utma</name>
                <value>217805784.1823725186.1200192408.1233385445.1224757719.11</value>
            </cookie>
            <cookie>
                <name>JSESSIONID</name>
                <value>A67C338CCC9C80FB2C818443038E66FB</value>
            </cookie>
        </cookies>
        <headers>
            <header>
                <name>host</name>
                <value>localhost</value>
            </header>
            <header>
                <name>user-agent</name>
               
 <value>Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; 
rv:1.9.0.3) Gecko/2008092417 Firefox/3.0.3</value>
            </header>
        </headers>
        <requestparameters>
            <parameter>
                <name>xmldebug</name>
                <value>true</value>
            </parameter>
        </requestparameters>
        <date>2008-12-05</date>
        <time>12:47:59</time>
        <url></url>
    </system>
    <showhtml>
        <![CDATA[
            <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" ">
            <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en" lang="en">
                <head>
                    <meta http-equiv="content-type" content="application/xhtml+xml;charset=utf-8" />
                    <title>Home</title>
                </head>
                <body>
                    <div>Hello
        ]]>
    </showhtml>
    <wm-user-username />
    <showhtml>
        <![CDATA[
                    , how are you today?</div>
                </body>
            </html>
        ]]>
    </showhtml>
</root>

The code sample above has been shortened to make it more understandable. You can see the system information and the HTML as it is escaped in CDATA tags. If you want to view the XSL that transforms this XML, use the XSLdebug parameter. See /wiki/spaces/PD/pages/24707099 for some practical examples of everyday expressions.