Copy Portlet Concepts

Copy portlet, one of the feature of WebSphere Portal, that i have implemented in my projects.It is a very good feature, once you use it you will realise it's power.
I am sharing my experience, when i suggested to use Copy Portlet concept in my projects and it saved major time frame.
For one of my project of US client for their WebSphere Portal implementation, there was a requirement in which they have two portal pages and both the page having the same portlet.
Basically, they wanted to have same portlet on both the pages but displaying data from different database schema.
How would you achieve this? just think about it for few mins before reading down....
The solution i suggested them to create Copy of the portlet and put it on another page. Provide schema name as parameter to copy portlet.
As as result, the rendering portlet will fetch the data from appropriate database schema, based on the parameter retrieved from copy portlet instance.
My another experience was with one of NewZeland based client.
Here, they have same page in the Top Navigation and in Left navigation, both top and left nav pages have the same portlet.
They wanted to have functionality like, landing screen of the portlet should be different as a result of top nav page click and left nav page click.
To achieve this, they started thinking to create two different portlet application which are going to be placed on top nav page and left nav page respectively.
In between, i suggested them to create Copy of existing Portlet and put on left nav page and provide parameter to copy portlet and based on the parameter value, portlet will render appropriate screen.
They were happy with that approach and of course it saved a major time frame for them and yes for us too ;-).
What i believe is - if proper technology is used at right time/place, that is the true respect towards the technology inventor/owner.

Next, i am going to right on Copy Portlet implementation...