Extreme Portal

InterPortlet Communication - Best Practice Matrix

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Fri, 13 Jan 2012 06:04:11 PST

I published "InterPortlet Communication - Best Practice Matrix" on IBM portal wiki.

This IPC Matrix helps to choose best practice for various scenarios of IPC.

Persisting user navigational states in WPS 7

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Fri, 09 Dec 2011 20:13:27 PST

You might have come across to situations where you would want WPS to persist user navigational states like

Portlet states:

    Normal
    Minimized
    Maximized

Portlet modes:

    config
    edit_defaults
    edit
    view
    help

Page selection:

    The last page that was active before the user logged out.

With the persistent session state feature, portal users can resume and continue a previously interrupted working session at the same state where they left the session. When the user logs out or the session times out, the portal stores the current navigational state into the database.

Resuming the session state is only possible if either the portal theme login link or WebSphere Application Server TAI based authentication is used to login to the portal.

Please have a look at detail article at Configuring user session persistance

How to know what all objects are stored in session at any point of time

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 07:20:26 PST

You might want to know at any point of time that how many objects are stored in session along with their size. This would be most useful when you are analyzing application performance or working on performance tuning area.
This would also be useful in debugging when your application is throwing java.io.NotSerializableException.

There is a servlet called com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.httpsession.SessionInspectServlet that ships with WAS located in com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.jar. This jar is placed under <WPS_ROOT>/AppServer/plugins/.
SessionInspectorServlet can be used to list down what all objects are stored in session along with size of the objects.

In order to use SessionInspectServlet, you would need to enable “Serving servlets by class name”, you can set this value in the ibm-web-ext.xmi
By default this value is true, you can see sample ibm-web-ext.xmi file below and can see that serveServletsByClassnameEnabled value is true.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

<webappext:WebAppExtension xmi:version="2.0" xmlns:xmi="http://www.omg.org/XMI" xmlns:webappext="webappext.xmi" xmi:id="WebAppExtension_1320397630802" reloadInterval="3" reloadingEnabled="true" additionalClassPath="" fileServingEnabled="true" directoryBrowsingEnabled="false" serveServletsByClassnameEnabled="true">

</webappext:WebAppExtension>

To list down session objects stored in session, you would required to hit below URL

http://localhost:10039/wps/<context-root>/SessionInspector/servlet/com.ibm.ws.webcontainer.httpsession.SessionInspectServlet

here, context root would be context root of your application. You can specify this while installing your WAR through portal admin console OR you can also find out this value inside application.xml located under <WPS_ROOT>/wp_profile/installedApps/<NODE>/<EAR NAME>/META-INF/

You would see list of your session objects and their size as shown in the screen shot.

How to get HttpServletRequest and HttpServletResponse from portlet request

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Thu, 17 Nov 2011 07:01:20 PST

There are some scenario when you want to get httpServletRequest or httpServletReponse from portletRequest.

IBM provides an utility class which gives you what you are looking for.

Yes, there is a PortletUtil class available in the com.ibm.ws.portletcontainer.portlet package, through which you can directly get httpServletRequest, httpServletResponse, ServletContext and many more servlet object you want.

Code to get HttpServletRequest from portletRequest/renderRequest/actionRequest.

HttpServletRequest httpServletRequest = PortletUtils.getHttpServletRequest(renderRequest);

There are couple of utility methods available in PortletUtil which gives you ServletContext, ServletConfig, PortletWindow, PortletApplicationDefinition etc.

How to reset JSF Portlets to initial state

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 22 Oct 2011 07:56:11 PDT

For a JSF based portlet, if you have a scenario where a user is navigating between screens and that portlet is having 2 or 3 screens, if the user went to 3rd screen and he comes back and clicked on the link it is going to 3rd screen instead of 1st screen.

To render 1st jsp from within portlet,we specify init parameter for first jsp in portlet.xml as follows

<init-param>

<name>com.ibm.faces.portlet.page.view</name>

<value>/jsp/html/view/HelloView.jsp</value>

</init-param>

Now in case, when you want to reset JSF Portlets to its initial view when user comes back, set "com.ibm.faces.portlet.page.view" attributed to session.

portletSession.setAttribute("com.ibm.faces.portlet.page.view", <path of jsp to render>);

Stopping Portal, WAS without userid,password in the command line

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Mon, 27 Jun 2011 23:49:58 PDT

Stopping portal and WAS using command line includes user id and password as part of command. Below command holds good when security is enabled.

stopServer.sh server1 -username wasadmin -password wasadmin

This would cause a security issue as while typing command, anyone can see and come to know about userid and password.

To overcome this kind of security breach, please follow below steps which would allow you to stop portal and WAS without providing user id and password in the command line.

1) Find the file soap.client.props located under /WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/AppSrv01/properties and change the values of userid and password for the following properties

com.ibm.SOAP.securityEnabled=true

com.ibm.SOAP.loginUserid=wasadmin

com.ibm.SOAP.loginPassword=wasadmin

the userid and password, will be the WAS admin'S userid and password.

2) Now that you are done with writing userid and password in the file. You can now run the command without specifying userid and password in the command line BUT still we have got security issue, because whoever knows path of this file, could see the userid and password in the file.

To overcome this, we need to obfuscate the password property in the soap.client.props file. We can use PropFilePasswordEncoder.sh command to obfuscate password propery.

Use the below command to achieve this

./PropFilePasswordEncoder.sh  /opt/IBM/WebSphere/AppServer/profiles/AppSrv01/properties/soap.client.props  com.ibm.SOAP.loginPassword

Now, if you open the file in a text editor, you will find that password property is now obfuscated.

3) Restart he portal server.

Now onwards, you won't need to specify userid and password in the command line for stopping Portal and WAS.

Identifying list of portlets on a page

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Wed, 22 Jun 2011 07:57:17 PDT

There might be some scenarios where you want to get list of all the portlets on a portal page.

Following code snipped would be helpful for you to get list of portlets on a page.

private void listPortletsOnPage(ContentModel model, RenderRequest request, RenderResponse response) {

        try {
            ContentModel model = getContentModel(request, response)
            Locator locator = model.getLocator();
            ObjectID oID = PortletURLHelper.getCurrentPage(request, response);
            ContentPage cPage = (ContentPage)locator.findByID(oID);
            PrintWriter out = response.getWriter();

            List allPortlets = getPortletsOnPage(model, cPage);

            Iterator it = allPortlets.iterator();

            while(it.hasNext()){
                PortletWindow window = (PortletWindow)it.next();
                out.print("PortletWindow " + window.getObjectID() + "
");
            }
        } catch (StateException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (NamingException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();
        }

    }


    private ContentModel getContentModel(RenderRequest renderRequest, RenderResponse renderResponse) {

        try {
            ContentModelProvider provider = (ContentModelProvider) psh.getPortletService(ContentModelProvider.class);
            return provider.getContentModel(renderRequest, renderResponse);
        } catch (PortletServiceUnavailableException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (ModelException e) {

            e.printStackTrace();
        }

        return null;

    }


    public List getPortletsOnPage(final ContentModel aContentModel, final ContentPage aPage) {
        List result = Collections.EMPTY_LIST;
        final LayoutModel aLayoutModel = aContentModel.getLayoutModel(aPage);
        if (aLayoutModel != null) {
            result = new ArrayList();
            try {
                collector(aLayoutModel, aLayoutModel.getRoot(), result);
            } catch (ModelException e) {
                e.printStackTrace();
            }
        }
        return result;
    }

Best practice of referencing resouces(css,img,js) in Portlet JSP

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sun, 15 May 2011 09:34:03 PDT

Any Portlet or j2ee Web application always include resources like css, images, js files.

In a web application, you can directly refer these resources using relative urls, but for Portlet Application it is NOT a good practice to use relative urls for including these types of resources.

For example:-

<link rel="stylesheet" href="../css/styles.css" type="text/css" />

Works well in a WebApplication.

BUT, in a portlet application, this will be interpreted relative to the portal

url by the browser and thus will not point to the resource you

intend to embed in your markup.

So basically, if the css and jsp are both present in a sub folder of the root

folder of your portlet application, It would be resolved by the browser

something like this

http://myserver/portalservlet-webapp-context+path/css/styles.css

Which is not the case and you would like browser to request like this

What you would like the browser to request is

http://myserver/myportlet-webapp-context/css/styles.css

So, in portlet you should be using absolute path including

the context path of your portlet app

<link rel="stylesheet"

href="/<%=request.getContextPath()%>/css/styles.css"

type="text/css"/>

IBM Portal notification

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 14:41:07 PDT

Portal Notifications for IBM WebSphere Portal allows authenticated portal users to View and Send Messages to other users of the same Portal. E-mail notifications are sent to the personal email account of the recipient, along with an announcement to indicate the arrival of a new message.

Have a look at detailed article at IBM Portal Notification on WebSphere Portal Wiki.

JSF portlet file upload

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 07:40:41 PDT

File upload functionality is very common to most of the portlet/web applications.
In portlet, file upload is treated a bit different than usual web application file uploads.
If it is a non-jsf portlet, you might need to use any third party file upload component like Apache commons file upload portlet.

Here I am writing steps to implement file upload functionality in JSR JSF portlet.

1) JSP code
1.1) Declaring enctype attribute of form
        Form enctype attribute value should be set to multipart/form-data

<h:form styleClass="create-listing-form" enctype="multipart/form-data">

   1.2) Component to browse file from file system

            <hx:fileupload id="logoUpload"
            tabindex="26">
                <hx:fileProp name="fileName" />
                <hx:fileProp name="contentType" />
            </hx:fileupload>

2) JSF managed bean code

protected HtmlFileupload logoUpload; // declare this as instance variable

    2.1) Method to get HtmlFileUpload object for the uploaded file

        protected HtmlFileupload getLogoUpload() {

            if (logoUpload != null) {
               logoUpload = (HtmlFileupload) findComponentInRoot("logoUpload");
             }
                return logoUpload;
        }

2.2) UploadFile method to get file bytestream and process it further to store in DB or onto file system as per the requirement.

         public void uploadFile(){

       ContentElement content = (ContentElement) getLogoUpload().getValue();


         if(content!=null){


// further validation can be applied with the help of ContentElement object to check type of file(image,text,doc) or maximum upload size to be allowed

              ByteArrayInputStream byteArrayInputStream = new ByteArrayInputStream(content.getContentValue());


// convert to inputStream to set as BinaryStream to CallableStatement object

                    InputStream inputStream = byteArrayInputStream;

                    // writing to another file on the file system

                    File outputFilename = new File(<FilePath>);

                    BufferedOutputStream bufferedOutputStream = new BufferedOutputStream(new FileOutputStream(<OutputFilename>));
                    int data;
                    while((data=byteArrayInputStream.read())!=-1) {
                        char ch = (char)data;
                        bufferedOutputStream.write(ch);
                    }

                    bufferedOutputStream.flush();
                    bufferedOutputStream.close();
                    byteArrayInputStream.close();
                    inputStream.close();

                }

         }

Sample XML for deploying custom Themes and Skins

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Thu, 03 Mar 2011 14:43:54 PST

Custom Theme and Skins creation involves creation of WAR file and then importing theme xml so that portal should have your theme entry under Themes and Skins section of portal. Once it is done, you can then apply thems to portal pages.

My first article on themes and skin was Creating custom Thems and Skins in WebSphere Portal
This article is second part to that because importing of theme xml comes after deployment of theme WAR.

Use this below xml to import your theme into portal.
P.S - In below xml MyTheme referes to theme name which is actually a folder name under your theme project/<WebContent>/themes/html/MyTheme.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<request
xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:noNamespaceSchemaLocation="PortalConfig_6.1.0.xsd"
type="update" create-oids="true">

<portal action="locate">

<skin action="update" active="true" objectid="NoSkin"
uniquename="wps.skin.noSkin" resourceroot="NoSkin" >
<localedata locale="en">
<title>NoSkin</title>
<description>A skin with no skin</description>
</localedata>
</skin>

<theme action="update" active="true" defaultskinref="NoSkin"
uniquename="ibm.portal.theme.MyTheme"
resourceroot="MyTheme"
context-root="/MyTheme">
<localedata locale="en">
<title>MyTheme</title>
</localedata>


<allowed-skin skin="NoSkin" update="set"/>
</theme>
</portal>
</request>

WebSphere Portal 7 and Spring 3.0 Portlet MVC Integration

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 15 Jan 2011 15:13:29 PST

I have found this article very useful at least for those who are going to start their development with Spring Portlet MVC and WebSphere Portal 7.

WebSphere Portal 7 and Spring 3.0 Portlet MVC Integration

Restricting public render parameter scope

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 13:50:43 PST

JSR 286 has introduced a concept of Public Render Parameter for communication between portlets in same or different WAR.
Public render paramter declared in a portlet, are accessible for all the portlets across the portal.
But in some case you might want to restrict the scope of public render parameter.

Let's take an example to understand this...

You have got two pages on which you have each instance of Book List and Book Details portlet.

Book list portlets shows all the books available in the library and when you select any book, Book Details portlet shows all the information about the book,
like book availability, book author e.t.c.

So you have these two portlets on two different pages say Page A and Page B.

By defalut public render parameter are global, so if you select any book from Book List portlet on page A, Book details portlet on Page A and Page B will start showing same book details.

In WebSphere Portal V6.1.x, you can control this behavior by limiting the sharing scope for public parameters to a page.

To limit sharing of public render parameter to another instance of the same portlet on other page, you can limit this scope by doing following:
Go to Edit page settings for page A and set param.sharing.scope (under Advanced options - I want to set parameters) to a non-empty value such as PageAScope.

Now Book Details portlet on Page A use their own shared values for their declared render parameters, and it will not conflict with rendering data of Book Details portlet on Page B.

Enforcing SSL for a perticular portal page

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 04:31:59 PST

Recently I have found a pretty good article on how to enforce a perticular portal page to be delivered using https.

If you have similar kind of requriment, this article would be of great help.

Enforcing SSL for particular WebSphere Portal pages

Controlling Portal pages visited history

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Fri, 31 Dec 2010 04:24:22 PST

History of Potal pages visited by users can be controlled by setting value of keymanager.lru.size property in StateManagerService.

This property actually indicates that navigation is affected between portal pages and not portlets.

As per IBM Info Center

"Use this parameter to specify the history expiration limit of portal pages visitedby users. This determines how far backwards users can at least navigate in therecent history of portal pages that they visited. The number that you specifydefines the minimum number of different pages selected by the user after whichthe portal can discard the render parameters of a page. (The decision whether therender parameters of the page are actually discarded depends on the expirationpolicy of the internal cache that stores the render parameters of those pages.) Ifthe user returns to a page after visiting the specified number of other pages and ifthe render parameters of that page have expired, the portal displays that page inits default state."

Note: If this parameter is enabled, number of Render Parameters in a session cansomewhat be controlled.
A typical setting would be keymanager.lru.size = 3.

JSF portlet - multiple action execution

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 25 Dec 2010 10:31:14 PST

This feature is used by IBM WebSphere Portal to stop processing the same Action request twice (for example, browser Back button feature).

wps.multiple.action.execution is a portlet initialization parameter that can be set in the portlet’s deployment descriptor (that is, portlet.xml).

If this protection feature is left on (wps.multiple.action.execution=true), WebSphere Portal would treat a repeated Action URL as a Render URL with no repetition of portlet action, rather portlet would just be rendered.
This is achieved by storing executed Action results and state in a session to prevent the multiple actions.

Setting up SSO between WebSphere Portal and Process server

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Fri, 17 Dec 2010 06:20:56 PST

Very good article on setting up SSO between WebSphere Portal and Process Server, below article would definitely help you.

Setting up SSO between WPS and WebSphere Process server

JSR 286 enhancements

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Tue, 23 Nov 2010 01:56:52 PST

JSR 168 <portlet:defineObjects/>, give access to following implicit objects in JSP
renderRequest, actionRequest, portletConfig

JSR 286 <portlet:defineObjects/> has been enhanced in this area and gives you access to following implicit objects on jsp

    -> renderRequest and renderResponse
    -> resourceRequest and resourceResponse
    -> actionRequest and actionResponse
    -> eventRequest and eventResponse
    -> portletConfig
    -> portletSession (returns an existing session or null if no session exists)
    -> Map<String,Object> portletSessionScope (provides access to the portletSession attributes)
    -> portletPreferences (provides access to the portlet preferences)
    -> Map<String, String[]> portletPreferencesValues (provides access to the portlet preferences as a Map)

Anonymous user session - Best practice

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Fri, 19 Nov 2010 09:38:32 PST

You might have required to enable session for Anonymous user for some business requirement and you might have done it by creating a custom property in portal configuration service called WP NavigatorService.
Creating a new custom property called public.session and value as true for WP NavigatorService.
This setting creates anonymous session for every user and for every portlet, which will definitely be a performance hit.

Now you may think how it will be performance hit, let me explain in brief
If the portlet does not require a session for critical operation, then perhaps any subfunctions within the portlet require the session can be suppressed to anonymous users.
This should be evaluated for each individual portlet.

If request.getPortletSession() or request.getPortletSession(true) are called when the user is not logged in and WebSphere Portal is not configured to use a session for anonymous users, each request from each client creates an extraneous PortletSession object that is lost and consumes JVM memory. This causes more frequent JVM garbage collection and hurts overall WebSphere Portal performance.

To overcome this performance issue, we can make use of JSR 286 new concept called Container Runtime Options.
With this concept, we can create Anonymous user session for a perticular portlet.

All you have to do is just add <container-runtime-option> tag to portlet.xml for a specific portlet you want to enable anonymous user session.
com.ibm.portal.public.session is the parameter name and set value as true.

Example:-

<container-runtime-option>
<name>com.ibm.portal.public.session</name>
<value>true</value>
</container-runtime-option>

Pre Rendering WCM site

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Mon, 15 Nov 2010 06:10:57 PST

Pre Rendering WCM sites in your portal environment will improve performance drastically.
Recently I just did pre rendering of WCM content for our portal environment and performance improved a lot.

I will briefly talk about Concepts, Limitations/Restrictions.

For further information and detailed configuration, I would strongly recommend to go through the info center and perform configuration as per your business needs.

Concept:-

Pre rendering allows you to cache your wcm content as static html files and save it to disk.
The pre rendered sites or static html can then be moved to web server and delivered to end users from web server.
It generates a static Web site as a set of HTML pages. Users requesting a page will get the pre-generated HTML page rather than a dynamic page from the Web Content Management connect servlet.
Web Content Management Caching, Servlet Caching (DynaCache), and pre-rendering are used to improve the performance of Workplace Web Content Management Web sites.
Although pre-rendering is the fastest option, its various limitations mean that most users will choose Web Content Management Caching or Servlet Caching over pre-rendering.

Limitations/Restrictions:-

Sites, site areas, and content items cannot contain characters that are considered invalid in file names by the operating system on which you are pre-rendering. For example, on a machine running Windows, these characters are invalid: / \ : * ? " < > |.

The pre-rendering feature cannot be used to pre-render JSP components and few more....

Here are the info center article for the same,

Pre-Rendered WCM Sites

Configuring Pre-Rendering

Accessing the pre-rendered site

EPhox EditLive Customization - Update

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 15:54:59 PST

Latest article on EPhox Edit Live might be useful for those who are using EditLive tool for managening their WCM contents in their Portal environment.

WebSphere Portal 7 - Product documentation

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 10:32:38 PST

All about WPS 7 Product documentaion

Enabling WebSphere Portal run time log

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 13:35:54 PST

To debug any portal or portlet related issues, you might want to get into detailed log analysis of your portal environment.

By enabling Portal run time logs, you can debug issue with Portlet Container, Portlet Environment, Portlet Load Monitoring, Deployment and of various types.

Have a look various logs level options, you can turn on for your portal environment.

Enabling WebSphere Portal Run time logs

Registry Services, Cache Manager service concepts and difference with portal performance views

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 13:36:47 PST

Portlet services concepts that might be of your interest and specially when you are tuning your portal.
I am summarizing the concepts in brief with this post

Registry service

Websphere Portal maintains information about many of portal resources in it's database.
To get the faster access of these resource information, they are being replicated into memory.
Registry service is responsible for replicating these resources from database into memory for faster access.
This replication happens periodically over a amount of time ( in seconds ) which can configured by configuring reload time property of registry service.
In a production environment we expect this type of information changes very infrequently, so we should use very long reload times for each type of data it is managing to get better performance.
One of the portal performance tuning says, increase reload time for registry service in a production environment.

Cache manager service

Cache manager service also used to cache data but in a very wide variety in memory.
These caches are somewhat similar to the registry service maintained by the registry service.
The key difference between Registry service and cache manager service are
A) The information stored in cache manager service is more dynamic in nature as compared to the information stored in registry service.
B) Cache manager service has a limited size and new entries will be discarded when cache becomes full.

The size is not limited in registry service. This contain all entries of a specific data types.
C) For each entry in cache, expiry times are managed individually for entries managed by cache manager service.

In case of registry service, when reload time is reached for a registry, the entries contents of that registry are reloaded.

JSF JSR portlet - calling JSF bean attribute within a JSTL tag

noreply@blogger.com (Neeraj Sidhaye) — Sat, 13 Nov 2010 13:37:57 PST

Recently I have expericened that when you call a JSF bean attribute from within a JSTL tag specially inside a conditional tag like <c:when... > , doesn't work at first and will not show you updated value of a bean attribute.
When you do a page refresh then jsf bean attribute updated value will be shown when invoked inside a jstl tag.

So be cautious when calling jsf bean attribute tag from within a jstl tag.

Let me explain in here with an example.

When jsf page renders, jsf backing bean getters are called. Now if any of the getter are being called from a jstl tag, then this getter will not give you updated value of bean attribute.

if you have code like this
<c:when test="${customerBean.fname}">, in this case, when your page renders, this customerBean.fname will not give you the udpated value and when you do a page refresh then this getter will display the updated value of fname.

<c:choose>
<c:when test="${customerBean.fname=='Neeraj'}">
   <c:out value="hello"/>
</c:when>
<c:otherwise>
   <c:out value="Bye"/>
</c:otherwise>
</c:choose>

Set some default value of bean attribute fname to "MyName" and on run time assign fname value to "Neeraj".

In above lines of code, with your first page render, you will find result as Bye and when do a page refresh you will see result as hello.

Solution to this kind of scenario is to use JSF panel group tag with rendered attribute as shown below.

<h:panelGroup rendered="#{customerBean.fname=='Neeraj'}">
   <c:out value="Hello">
</h:panelGroup>
<h:panelGroup rendered="#{customerBean.fname!='Neeraj'}">
   <c:out value="Bye">
</h:panelGroup>