GEORGE MAGGESSY

Inline Editing in Content Presenter for Multiple Data Files [Addendum]

2012-05-10T13:58:00.001-07:00

This post is to add the “Create new web content in Site Studio” missing functionality to my previous post.

The highlighted button will open the Site Studio Content Wizard in a popup.

You can download the new source code from here.

Inline Editing in Content Presenter for Multiple Data Files

2012-05-03T16:23:00.000-07:00

If you are not familiar with Content Presenter, please stop reading this post and look into the documentation, after that you might want to come back to this post. I guarantee it will be really useful in the future.

As you might already know now, Content Presenter task flow only allows inline editing for single data files (CDF). Many customer have requested the same functionality when displaying multiple CDFs simultaneously, for example, as a result of a CMIS query. Such feature is currently not supported by Content Presenter, however there is a way of accomplishing such functionality by tweaking your content presenter template. Let me explain the trick here.

I’ve created 2 content presenter templates. The first one displays a list of data files.

   1:  <?xml version = '1.0'?>

   2:  <jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page" version="2.1"

   3:            xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich"

   4:            xmlns:dt="http://xmlns.oracle.com/webcenter/content/templates"

   5:            xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">

   6:     <dt:contentListTemplateDef var="nodes">

   7:        <af:panelGroupLayout layout="vertical" id="nodeListPanel" valign="top"

   8:                             inlineStyle="#{composerContext.subView == 'contentContribution' ? 'border:2px dashed blue' : ''}">

   9:              <af:iterator rows="0" var="node" varStatus="iterator"

  10:                           value="#{nodes}" id="i1">

  11:                 <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl1" layout="vertical">

  12:                    <dt:contentTemplate node="#{node}"

  13:                                        view="templates.mytemplate.item"

  14:                                        nodesHint="#{nodes}" id="ct1"/>

  15:                    <f:facet name="separator">

  16:                       <af:spacer height="15px" id="s1"/>

  17:                    </f:facet>

  18:                 </af:panelGroupLayout>

  19:              </af:iterator>

  20:        </af:panelGroupLayout>

  21:     </dt:contentListTemplateDef>

  22:  </jsp:root>

Line 8 adds the blue dashed line around the contribution area. It’s a nice thing to add to your template ‘cause it will give the same look and feel as the standard content presenter.

The second template renders a single data file, and it is in here that we do the magic.

   1:  <?xml version = '1.0'?>

   2:  <jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page" version="2.1"

   3:            xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich"

   4:            xmlns:dt="http://xmlns.oracle.com/webcenter/content/templates"

   5:            xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">

   6:    <dt:contentTemplateDef var="node">

   7:      <af:panelGroupLayout layout="vertical" id="pgl3">

   8:        <af:panelGroupLayout id="pgl1" layout="horizontal"

   9:                             rendered="#{backingBeanScope.presenterBacking.editableBySiteStudio and pageEditorPanelBean.view eq 'CC_VIEW'}""

  10:                             halign="right">

  11:          <af:commandImageLink id="gil1" shortDesc="#{dlBndl.OPEN_SS_CONTRIBUTOR}"

  12:                               icon="/adf/webcenter/edit_ena.png">

  13:            <af:showPopupBehavior popupId="psvPopup"/>

  14:          </af:commandImageLink>

  15:          <af:commandLink id="psvCtb3" shortDesc="#{dlBndl.SS_REFRESH_SHORT_DESC}"

  16:                          actionListener="#{backingBeanScope.presenterBacking.handleRefresh}">

  17:            <af:image source="/adf/webcenter/refresh_ena.png" id="img1"/>

  18:          </af:commandLink>

  19:          <f:facet name="separator">

  20:            <af:spacer width="10" height="10" id="s1"/>

  21:          </f:facet>

  22:        </af:panelGroupLayout>

  23:        <af:outputFormatted value="#{node.propertyMap['RD_EXAMPLE:BODY'].asTextHtml}"

  24:                            id="ot1"/>

  25:      </af:panelGroupLayout>

  26:      <af:popup id="psvPopup" contentDelivery="lazyUncached">

  27:        <af:panelWindow id="psvPw2" title="#{dlBndl.EDIT_DOCUMENT_MENU_LABEL} #{node.propertyMap['dDocName'].value}"

  28:                        modal="true" stretchChildren="first" contentWidth="600"

  29:                        contentHeight="500" resize="on">

  30:          <af:inlineFrame id="psvReg1"

  31:                          source="../../cs/idcplg?IdcService=WCM_EDIT_DATA_FILE&amp;dDocName=#{node.propertyMap['dDocName'].value}"/>

  32:        </af:panelWindow>

  33:      </af:popup>

  34:    </dt:contentTemplateDef>

  35:  </jsp:root>

A you can see, in line 27 I invoke the Site Studio Contributor window through the url http://<ucm_server>:<port>/cs/idcplg?IdcService=WCM_EDIT_DATA_FILE&dDocName=#{node.propertyMap['dDocName'].value}.

The other interesting tip is #{pageEditorPanelBean.view eq 'CC_VIEW'}. It will only render the contribution toolbar if the user is in Contributor mode (Ctrl + Shift + C).

All the other boilerplate code is just to make the app look nicer.

You can download the source code from here.

WebCenter Portal Pretty URL Beyond Limits

2012-04-25T18:49:00.001-07:00

Imagine that you have a customer that wants to create URL shortcuts for each of their products. Let’s say ACME has hundreds of products and a single page that according to the product id HTTP GET parameter it renders a different page. You certainly don’t want to create a single entry for each product in your Navigation Model nor have the customer or business user memorize all product ids, right?

So there’s a quick and easy solution which is to extend WebCenter’s CustomViewHandler. The CustomViewHandler is responsible for handling the separation between the pretty URL and page id in the navigation model itself. As you’ll see in the sample code I developed a class called MyCustomViewHandler and registered it in the faces-config.xml file.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="windows-1252"?>
<faces-config version="1.2" xmlns="http://java.sun.com/xml/ns/javaee">
<application>
<default-render-kit-id>oracle.adf.rich</default-render-kit-id>
<view-handler>oracle.webcenter.portal.sample.MyCustomViewHandler</view-handler>
</application>
…
</faces-config>

In the attached sample code I’ll address the 2 cases below.

Internal URL	Pretty URL
/product?PID=123	/product/EarthquakePills
/product?PID=456	/product/TornadoKit

To test the application, replace the home URL by http://<server>:<port>/acme/faces/home by http://<server>:<port>/acme/faces/product/EarthquakePills and http://<server>:<port>/acme/faces/product/TornadoKit.

Notice that the default-navigation-model.xml does not contain EarthquakePills nor TornadoKit as link nodes.

I hope you enjoyed the post. I’m sure it will be useful in your current WebCenter project.

Download the JDeveloper application here.

Enabling Coherence for Content Presenter in WebCenter Portal PS4

2012-04-25T15:09:00.001-07:00

Content Presenter uses CMIS REST APIs to surface UCM content and JOC for local (in-memory) cache. Which means that by default it does not leverage Coherence, despite the fact that it comes with WLS.
You can enable content caching with Coherence for both WebCenter Spaces and WebCenter Portal. For the former you need to create a file called content-coherence-cache-config.xml. This file can be either in the EAR classpath or server's system classpath.

Setting the jar file in the system classpath is as easy as copying the jar file with the aforementioned xml file under $DOMAIN_HOME/lib.

To illustrate how to put the xml file in the EAR classpath I’ve created a JDeveloper application called WebCenterPortalCoherence. Under WebCenterPortalCoherence/src I’ve created a APP-INF/lib directory and I’ve added a jar file called porta-coherence.jar containing only content-coherence-cache-config.xml to the EAR deployment profile packaging as shown below.

Deploy your application and voila.

To verify if Coherence is running I set the -Dtangosol.coherence.management=all to the JVM startup parameter, to be more specific I set that under setDomainEnv.sh. After bouncing the managed server where you have your application deployed, connect to it using JConsole and check for Coherence in the MBeans tab. You should also see something like this in your log:

2012-04-25 14:45:47.321/1278.178 Oracle Coherence GE 3.6.0.4 <Info> (thread=[ACTIVE] ExecuteThread: '1' for queue: 'weblogic.kernel.Default (self-tuning)', member=n/a): Loaded cache configuration from "zip:/oracle/app/admin/domains/webcenter/servers/WC_CustomPortal/tmp/_WL_user/WebCenterPortalCoherence_application1_V2.0/i092wg/APP-INF/lib/portal-coherence.jar!/content-coherence-cache-config.xml"

You can download the JDeveloper project from here.

For more info on content-coherence-cache-config.xml, please read Oracle’s documentation.

Cookbook: SES and UCM setup

2012-03-26T11:16:00.001-07:00

The purpose of this post is to guide you setting up the integration between UCM and SES. On my next post I’ll show different approaches to integrate WebCenter Portal, UCM and SES based on some common scenarios. Let’s get started.

WebCenter Content Configuration

WebCenter Content has a component that adds functionality to the content server to allow it to be searched via the Oracle SES. To enable the component installation, go to Administration -> Admin Server and select SESCrawlerExport. Click the update button and restart UCM_server1 managed server.

Once the managed server is back, we’ll configure the component. In the menu, under Administration you should see SESCrawlerExport. Click on the link.

You’ll see the window below. Click on Configure SESCrawlerExport.

Configure the values below:

Hostname: SES hostname.
Feed Location: Directory where data feeds will be saved.
Metadata List: List of metadata that will be searchable by SES.

After updating the values click on the Update button. Come back to the SESCrawlerExport Administration UI and click on Take Snapshot button. It will create the data feeds in the specified Feed Location.
To check if the correct configuration was done, please access the following URL http://<ucm_server>:<port>/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWLOAD_CONFIG&source=default.
It should download config file in the format below:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<rsscrawler xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/search/rsscrawlerconfig">
<feedLocation><![CDATA[http://adc6160699.us.oracle.com:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWNLOAD_CONTROL&source=default]]></feedLocation>
<errorFileLocation><![CDATA[http://adc6160699.us.oracle.com:16200/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_STATUS&IsJava=1&source=default&StatusFeed=]]></errorFileLocation>
<feedType>controlFeed</feedType>
<sourceName>default</sourceName>
<securityType>attributeBased</securityType>
<securityAttribute name="Account" grant="true"/>
<securityAttribute name="DocSecurityGroup" grant="true"/>
<securityAttribute name="Collab" grant="true"/>
</rsscrawler>

Make sure Account and DocSecurityGroup values are true.

SES Configuration

Let’s start by configuring the Identity Plug-ins in SES. Go to Global Settings -> System -> Identity Management Setup. Select Oracle Content Server and click the Activate button.

We’ll populate the following values:

HTTP endpoint for authentication: URL to WebCenter Content. Notice that /cs/idcplg was added at the end of the URL.
Admin User: UCM Admin user. This user must have access to all CPOE content.
Password: Password to Admin user.
Authentication Type: NATIVE.

Go back to the Home tab and click on Sources on the top left. Select Oracle Content Server on the right and click the Create button.

Configuration URL: URL that point to the configuration file. Example: http://<ucm_hostname>:<port>/cs/idcplg?IdcService=SES_CRAWLER_DOWNLOAD_CONFIG&source=default.
User ID: UCM Admin user.
Password: Password to Admin user.

Click on the Authorization tab and add the appropriate values to the fields below. Make sure you see the ACCOUNT and DOCSECURITYGROUP security attributes at the end of the page.

HTTP endpoint for authorization: http://<ucm_hostname>:<port>/cs/idcplg.
Display URL prefix: http://<ucm_hostname>:<port>/cs.
Administrator user: UCM Admin user.
Administrator password.

On the Document Types tab, add the documents that should be indexed by SES.
As our last step, we’ll configure the Federation Trusted Entities under Global Settings.

Entity Name: The user must be present in both the identity management server configured for your WebCenter application and the identity management server configured for Oracle SES. For instance, I used weblogic in my sample.
Password: Entity user password.\

Now you are ready to test the integration on the SES UI: http://<ses hostname>:<port>/search/query/.

Clarifying WebCenter’s Enterprise Deployment Guide

2011-09-10T15:53:00.001-07:00

I’ve been on customer site trying to advise about how to properly deploy the WebCenter Suite. A common comment always comes right off the bat: “I’ve seen the WebCenter Enterprise Deployment Guide, but I’m not sure about the VIPs / IPs distribution”.
So, the objective here is only to clarify what the picture below means. As you can see we have a pretty common scenario with a couple of SOA boxes and another set of WebCenter ones. Every single box has its own IP. IP1 for SOAHOST1, IP2 for SOAHOST2, and so on. The IPs position in the picture is a little bit misleading, since in some cases its ellipses touch individual managed servers, making you believe that it should be only associated to that specific managed server. Remember, IPs are for the whole box.
VIPs are commonly used for server migration purposes, and therefore should not be needed for managed servers. If a managed server fails, we should be able to bring another one up. However, there are a couple of exceptions: the AdminServer and SOA.
The SOAHOST1 box mentions 2 VIPs. VIP1 is associated to the AdminServer, which means that if the machine hosting the AdminServer fails, you should be able to bring up the AdminServer on SOAHOST2 with minimum hassle. Maintaining the same address so that the admin address referenced by OHS and by the managed servers does not change.
SOA servers are the other exception. WLS_SOA1 and WLS_SOA2 have independent VIPs. In the case of a SOA server failure, there could be an in-flight transactions that needs recovery. And the cleanest way of accomplishing it is to migrate the Transaction Recovery Service. There are two requirements though:

1. Only the same server can recover its own transactions, therefore VIPs are key here so we need to migrate the service to another machine.
2. And the transaction log records should be on shared file system – another important black spot on the docs - so that the failed-over server can access and recover them.
And finally, since SOA and AdminServer have independent failover requirements, they cannot share the same VIP.

To finalize, I’d like to thank Roy Sandjaja, from Oracle Development, that has helped me understand the whole picture. Cheers, mate!
Hope this helps.

BPM Process Portal Configuration on WebCenter 11g PS4

2011-09-02T16:37:00.000-07:00

You might have seen Andrejus’ great blog post series about Configuring BPM Process Portal in PS3, but despite of all his detailed instructions, my environment seemed to have a different “behavior”, and while following his instructions I faced different problems, where one of them was an actual known issue in PS3.
And that’s why I took the initiative of writing my own installation cookbook to make sure I would document all the steps and workarounds that I had to do in order to have the Process Portal properly configured. The environment where I set this up is a WebCenter 11g PS4 domain, extended with ECM and SOA technologies. You don’t need to have it previously setup with SOA, but UCM in this case is a must. Let’s go to the steps.

Configuration Process

WebCenter Components Configuration

Step 1. Make sure you have the following components enabled in UCM: DynamicConverter, Folders_g, and WebCenterConfigure. You can enable these components by accessing UCM (http://<ucm_server>:16200/cs) under Administration -> Admin Server -> Component Manager.

Step 2. Bounce the UCM_server1.

Step 3. Setup Dynamic Converter. On the main page, under Administration -> Dynamic Converter Admin -> Configuration Settings -> Conversion Formats, select the file formats from the drop down list. Chose all the formats of documents you will want to get HTML renditions of, such as word, excel, powerpoint, pdf.

Extending WebCenter Domain with Oracle BPM Spaces template

Step 1. Shutdown AdminServer and managed servers in the WebCenter domain.

Step 2. Extend the WebCenter domain, by invoking $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/Oracle_WC1/common/bin/config.sh.

Step 3. Select the your domain.

Step 4. Select $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/Oracle_WC1/common/templates/applications/oracle.bpm.spaces_template_11.1.1.jar as the template.

Step 5. Click “next” until the process is over.

Step 6. Restart AdminServer and all the other managed servers (UCM_server1, WC_Collaboration, and WC_Spaces).

Running the Process Portal Script

Step 1. Make sure you have Java 6 in your path by running java –version.

Step 2. Start the following managed servers: AdminServer, WC_Collaboration, UCM_server1, and WC_Spaces.

Step 3. Go to the directory $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/Oracle_SOA1/bpm/processportal and configure the portal-process.properties file according to your environment. You can download my reference file from here, and I strongly advise you to do so.
Below you find a table explaining each of the entries on the mentioned file (kudos go to BPM Product Management for documenting it).

Properties	Property Description
extendSoa	The flag to decide whether to extend the existing BPM domain or create a new one. The value must be true if the Webcenter and SOA are in same domain, else false.
promptForPasswords	The flag to decide whether to prompt for passwords or read them from the process-portal-install.properties file while running the installer.
Oracle BPM Schema Details
bpmDBUser	User name to connect to the database configured for Oracle BPM
bpmDBPassword	Password to connect to the Oracle BPM's database
bpmDBType	Database type configured for Oracle BPM
bpmDBDriver	Driver used to connect to Oracle BPM's database
bpmDBUrl	URL of the Oracle BPM's database, like jdbc:oracle:thin:@adc2170307:1521
Oracle BPM MDS Details
bpmMDSUser	User name for the MDS schema used for Oracle BPM
bpmMDSPassword	Password for Oracle BPM's MDS schema
Oracle BPM Runtime Details
bpmHost	Server on which Oracle BPM is installed
bpmRuntimePort	Port on which Oracle BPM is running
bpmAdminUser	Name of the user that has Administrator privileges on the SOA server
bpmAdminPassword	Password for the Oracle BPM Admin user
WebCenter Spaces Installation Details
wcOracleHome	Path to the WebCenter Oracle home directory
wcDomainName	Name of the domain where WebCenter is installed. If extendSoa flag is set to true, point to the BPM domain
wcSetDomainRealmPassword	Flag to control whether to set domain realm password; set the value to either true or false. Note: This property is for setting up Global Trust. It is recommended that you do not enable this property; set Global Trust manually.
wcDomainRealmPassword	Password to set up trusted domains. Same password must be set on Oracle BPM domain as well. Note: This property is for setting up Global Trust. It is recommended that you set Global Trust manually, and not by using this property.
wc.server.port	Port on which WC_Spaces managed server is hosted
WebCenter's WebLogic installation Details
wcHost	Host name on which WebCenter's Admin server is running
wcAdminPort	Port number on which WebCenter's Admin server is running
wcAdminUser	Admin user for WebCenter Admin server
wcAdminPwd	Password of the WebCenter Admin server
wcManagedServerName	Name of the WC_Spaces managed server
wcConfigServices	Flag to configure the Oracle Content Server and Discussions Server to work with Oracle WebCenter. The Content and Discussion Server details listed later in this table must be specified only if wcConfigServices is set to true. Note: It is strongly recommended that you manually configure Oracle Content Server and Discussions Server to work with Oracle WebCenter.
Content Server Details	Set these properties if wcConfigServices is set to true.
wcContentServerName	Name of the Content Server configured for Oracle WebCenter
wcContentServerPort	Port on which Content Server is running.
wcContentSpacesRoot	Name of the Spaces root folder on Content Server
wcContentAdminUser	The name of the Admin user for Content Server
Discussion Server Details	Set these properties if wcConfigServices is set to true.
wcDiscussionServerUrl	Name of the Discussion Server configured for WebCenter
wcDiscussionAdminUser	Name of the Admin user for Discussion Server

Step 4. Run the following script: $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin/ant –f install.xml.

Step 5. The previous script will shutdown the WC_Spaces managed server. Start it back again. Don’t forget to check if it has crashed any other managed server. If that happened, restart the broken managed server.

Step 6. Open the process-portal.properties file and change the properties extendSoa and wcConfigServices from true to false.

Step 7. Run the previous script by adding a new parameter: $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/modules/org.apache.ant_1.7.1/bin/ant –f install.xml -DpiArgs="-importGSOnly".

Step 8. The former will shutdown AdminServer and WC_Spaces. Restart both servers and don’t forget to check whether the other managed servers are running as well. If you’ve seen any exceptions while running any of scripts mentioned on steps 3 and 6, fix it first before moving forward.

Step 9. Check if some roles were provisioned by the previous scripts. In UCM, under Administration –> Admin Applets –> User Admin you should see the ProcessPortal group and the ProcessPortalUser role as part of the aforementioned group.

In WebLogic Console, you should see a ProcessPortalUser group. I had to create that group manually, since it did not get provisioned “automagically”.

Step 10. Check if the forums have been properly provisioned as well. I also had to manually set that up by editing each of the newly create Space (Process Workspace and Modeling Space).

Log in as weblogic.
Click on Administration.
Select either Process Workspace or Modeling Space.
Click on Edit –> Edit Space.
On the Services tab, click on Announcements and then on the magnifying lens. Do the same for Discussions.

Step 11. Log in to WebCenter Spaces with an administrator account, such as weblogic, and enable the Process Workspace and Modeling Space spaces to a user that is also a valid BPM user.

Final Step. Login with a valid BPM user, in my case it’s jcooper, and check if Process Workspace and Modeling Space are working properly.

For more information about what Process Portal is about, please access Oracle’s documentation. And please leave a comment whether you have or have not succeeded on this configuration.

Improving WebCenter Performance (IIS Addendum)

2011-06-01T16:39:00.000-07:00

If you read my previous post you might be wondering if you can achieve a similar performance with a different Web Server such as Microsoft Information Server. In this article I’ll describe the steps you need to follow to have IIS not only applying content compression, but also rewriting the expiration data in the HTTP header.

STEPS

1. Open the Internet Information Services Manager, right-click on the Default Web Site option and select Properties.

2. The window below should show up. Check the “Expire after” option and set it to 1,193 Hour(s). It will change the HTTP header Cache-control parameter from Expire to max-age in all local static resources, which solves the Internet Explorer caching issue.

3. Click on the MIME Types button and add the following ones:

4. Select the ISAPI Filters tab and check where the WebLogic ISAPI plug-in (wlFilter) is installed. The plug-in allows a smooth integration of WebLogic's HTTP functionality into Microsoft IIS.

Under the iisforward.dll’s directory you should find iisproxy.ini. Open the ini file and add the FileCaching=ON property as shown below. It will add another level of buffer to IIS and force it to add Content-Length property to the HTTP Header.

WebLogicHost=<WebCenter / Load Balancer host> 
WebLogicPort=<WebCenter / Load Balancer port> 
ConnectTimeoutSecs=20 
ConnectRetrySecs=2 
WlForwardPath=/webcenter,/rest 
Debug=OFF 
FileCaching=ON

5. Make sure content compression is still setup. Right-click on Web Sites and choose properties.

Select the Service tab. The “Compress static files” option must be checked.

Don’t forget to restart IIS after the changes.

Improving WebCenter Performance

2011-06-01T16:07:00.001-07:00

Tuning is quite a long and complex subject to be discussed in a single article. This first post will cover 2 basic strategies to make your Oracle WebCenter installation faster by tweaking the browser caching and adding content compression. By the end of this article your WebCenter pages should be rendering in less than 2 seconds – obviously depending on your environment – and with fewer requests.

Browser Caching

Your browser has a folder in which certain items that have been downloaded are stored for future access. Images, stylesheets, javascripts, and even entire web pages are examples of cached items. When accessing a website, your browser will check its cache folder first to see if it already has those images and, if so, it won't take the time to download them again.
There are two main reasons that web caches are used:

To reduce latency — Because the request is satisfied from the cache instead of the web server itself, it takes less time for the representation to render in the browser.
To reduce network traffic — Since there are less items to be downloaded from a web site, it reduces the amount of bandwidth used by a client.

Like in any other application, WebCenter Portal have static resources that need to be cached by the browser in order to reduce subsequent download access. The trick here is to setup OHS to rewrite the HTTP header of some specific virtual paths related to static resources in WebCenter.
We will use max-age instead of Expire. The max-age directive specifies the maximum amount of time that a representation – or file - will be considered fresh. From my perspective, the big advantage of this directive is that it’s relative to the time of the request, rather than absolute. max-age also seems to behave better with IE in general. I haven’t checked that in IE 9 so far. For this exercise, we’ve setup max-age to 2592000 seconds (30 days).

Header unset Last-Modified

Header unset Expires

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"

Header set Surrogate-Control "max-age=2592000"

Content Compression

To do content compression in OHS you need to configure mod_deflate. It should already be installed in your OHS under $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/Oracle_WT1/ohs/modules/mod_deflate.so. But it might not be loaded.

LoadModule deflate_module        "${ORACLE_HOME}/ohs/modules/mod_deflate.so"

With mod_deflate, you can compress HTML, text or XML files to approx. 20 - 30% of their original sizes, thus saving you server traffic. However, compressing files causes a slightly higher load on the server, but again, clients' connection times to your server decrease a lot.
mod_deflate requires you to specify which type files are going to be compressed.

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/plain

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xhtml+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/css

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE image/svg+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/rss+xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/atom_xml

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE application/x-javascript

AddOutputFilterByType DEFLATE text/html

Images are supposed to be in a compressed format, and therefore are bypassed by mod_deflate.

SetOutputFilter DEFLATE
SetEnvIfNoCase Request_URI \.(?:gif|jpe?g|png)$ no-gzip dont-vary

QUICK SETUP

To have all those changes applied to your environment, please download webcenter.conf and replace the variables listed below accordingly.

[wc_spaces host]
[wc_spaces port]
[wc_services host]
[wc_services port]
[ses host]
[ses host]

If you already have portlets being consumed by your application, don’t forget to add the proper mod_wl entries.

#Portlets

#Insert your portlet mapping here

<Location /[portlet path]>

SetHandler weblogic-handler

WeblogicHost [wc_portlet host]

WeblogicPort [wc_portlet port]

</Location>

And if you have already separate the static assets from your application into a different directory, you might want to set the same configuration:

Alias /[virtual path for static files] [physical path for static files]

<Location /[virtual path for static files]/>

Header unset Last-Modified

Header unset Expires

Header set Cache-Control "max-age=2592000, public"

Header set Surrogate-Control "max-age=2592000"

</Location>

After doing the proper setup you can drop the webcenter.conf file into $MIDDLEWARE_HOME/Oracle_WT1/instances/instance1/config/OHS/ohs1/moduleconf. You MUST restart OHS for the changes to take effect.

TESTING

Now let’s access WebCenter to see how fast it is. The first access any WebCenter Spaces page should be faster since we’re using content compression, but it should still bring lots of resources such as js files, images, css, etc.

1st Access

Activities page renders in approximately 7.5 secs with 91 requests.

2dn Access

A subsequent access to the same page takes less than half a second and only requires a single request. All other static assets are cached by the browser and don’t need to be downloaded again.

Others

Any other request to pages that haven’t been accessed before should take less requests to render, since most of the WebCenter resources have been downloaded previously.

Spaces page takes 1.1 seconds and 7 requests to render. Blazing fast, my friends!

Setting up Task List portlets in WebCenter

2011-06-01T16:07:00.000-07:00

The Task List is a standard JSR-168 portlet that allows you to check the ToDo tasks and take actions on those. Since the task list is a WSRP portlet producer application, it must be deployed on a managed server configured as a portlet container, such as WC_Portlet.
The objective of this post is to have a Cookbook format. The same steps can be found in Oracle’s documentation, except for some caveats and images that should smooth the process.

Steps

The picture above describes the deployment architecture as well as some basic interaction between the involved managed servers. Please notices that we have two different domains in the picture.

Deploying Task List Portlet
1. Because the task list portlet producer application uses the deployed library oracle.soa.workflow.wc, you must confirm that the library is targeted to the Oracle WebLogic Server portlet managed server.

a. Log in to Oracle WebLogic Server Administration Console.
b. Go to Deployments > oracle.soa.workflow.wc >Targets.
c. See if WLS_Portlet is checked. If not, check it and save your updates.

2. In WebCenter PS3 there’s a shared lib issue. You also need to deploy rules.jar as a shared library in WC_Portlet. You can find rules.jar under <JDEV_INSTALL>/jdeveloper/soa/modules/oracle.rules_11.1.1/rules.jar.

3. Deploy the TaskListPortlet.ear file WC_Portlet.

a. You can find it under /Oracle_Home/SOA_Home/soa/applications/TaskListPortlet.ear.
b. Ensure that the WSRP producer application is running by accessing the WSDL from a web browser http://server:port/TaskListPortlet/portlets/wsrp2?WSDL.

Connecting Task List Producer to SOA Server

The next step is to configure the remote JNDI providers on WebCenter. As mentioned before, the task list portlet bring the info from SOA server through remote EJB calls.

1. Log in to WLS Console and navigate to Domain Structure > Services > Foreign JNDI Providers.

a. Click New. In the Name field, enter ForeignJNDIProvider-SOA, target it to WC_Portlet, and click OK.
b. Click the ForeignJNDIProvider-SOA link and enter the values in the table below.

Initial Context Factory weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory

Provider URL t3://[soa_hostname]:[port]/soa-infra

User weblogic

Password Enter weblogic password.

Confirm Password Password confirmation.

2. Click the Links tab. Under Foreign JNDI Links, click New. Now enter the same values on the table below to Name, Local JNDI Name, and Remote JNDI Name.

RuntimeConfigService

ejb/bpel/services/workflow/TaskServiceBean

ejb/bpel/services/workflow/TaskMetadataServiceBean

TaskReportServiceBean

TaskEvidenceServiceBean

TaskQueryService

UserMetadataService

Configuring EJB Identity Propagation

We’ll start by enabling global trust. Log in to the WLS Adm Console for WebCenter.

On the left side of the page, click on Domain > Security > Advanced and modify the domain credentials.

Log in to the SOA server Admin Console and modify the domain credentials to the same password as entered for WebCenter.
Regarding application authorization, the same user logged-in to the Spaces application must be present in the Porlet and SOA identity stores, or the three servers could point to the same identity store. For this post we have OID setup as the common identity store. For more info please see Oracle doc.

Securing the Task List Portlet Producer Application Using Web Services Security

We’ll start by enabling WS-Security for the task list portlet producer application.
1. Open Oracle Enterprise Manager.

2. In the navigator on the left side, select Farm_wc_domain > WebLogic Domain.

3. Right-click wc_domain and select Security > Security Provider Configuration.

4. Access the Keystore section at the bottom of the provider configuration page and click Configure.

a. Let’s generate the keystore.
keytool -genkeypair -keyalg RSA -alias orakey -keypass welcome1 -keystore default-keystore.jks -storepass welcome1 -validity 3600

b. Copy default-keystore.jks file to WEBCENTER_DOMAIN/config/fmwconfig.

c. Enter the details for keystore management and identity certificates as shown below.

d. Click OK.

e. Restart WC_Portlet and AdminServer in the WebCenter domain.

f. Follow the same steps starting at b, but now for the SOA domain. To make your life easier we’ll use the same default-keystores.jks file, which means that you don’t need to run the keytool command again.

Specifying the Inbound Security Policy

1. Open Oracle Enterprise Manager.

2. Right-click Application Deployments > TaskListPortlet (WC_Portlet).

3. Select Web Services.

4. Click on WSRP_v2_Markup_Service.

5. Attach oracle/wss10_saml_token_with_message_protection_service_policy.

6. Click OK.

7. Restart WC_Portlet.

Consuming Task List Portlet from WebCenter Spaces

1. Right-click Farm_wc_domain > WebCenter > WebCenter Spaces > webcenter. Select Settings > Service Configuration.

2. Register a new portlet producer with the following information.

3. Once the portlet producer is successfully register, open WebCenter Spaces and drop the portlet into any page. That’s how it should look like.

You can double check your task list content by logging in into Business Process Workspace with the same user, obviously. You should see the same tasks.

WebCenter Navigation triggered from UCM Content – Missing Part

2011-02-01T15:11:00.000-08:00

In my last post I forgot to mention a shortcut to invoke Site Studio Contributor from inside WebCenter. As you might know Ctrl + Shift + F5 invokes the Contributor in a Site Studio website, in WebCenter it’s Ctrl + Shift + C. Once you invoke the shortcut you should see a dotted blue line around your Content Presenter.

Notice the toolbar on the top left. The edit button (pencil) invokes Site Studio Contributor window.

To get back to your normal window, just press Ctrl +Shift + C again.
Another interesting shortcut is Ctrl +Shift + E. It takes you to the Editing Page mode.

You can download the sample app here. Remember to change the UCM connection to your own Content Server and to recreate the region template, region definition and data files.

WebCenter Navigation triggered from UCM Content

2011-01-30T18:03:00.000-08:00

You probably have already seen in many posts out there how to consume and display content from UCM into your WebCenter Portal Framework application and/or Spaces app. Now I want to show you how to navigate from your UCM Data File to a WebCenter page. You should definitely read this post if you currently have a Site Studio based website and want to migrate it to WebCenter. Unfortunately, currently there is no migration path to take your existing navigation structure from UCM to WebCenter Portal. You’ll have to review your UCM Navigation Model and manually rewrite it, splitting it into many navigation models according to your security needs.
To showcase the solution I created a small sample application with only 2 pages. The first one is the Home page with an UCM data file displayed through Content Presenter. This data file has a link to Page 2.

WebCenter Portal Framework

The first step is to open the default-navigation-model.xml file in JDeveloper and create an ExternalId url attribute in the page you want to navigate to. In our case it’s Page 2.

I’ll name it page2.

Just to clarify I have the region definition and region template info below.

Region Definition

Title and Content are a plain text and wysiwyg element types respectively.

Region Template

   1: <div>

   2: <div><!--$wcmElement("TITLE")--></div>

   3: <div><!--$wcmElement("CONTENT")--></div>

   4: </div>

Now add the link to Page 2 on the data file. Open Oracle Content Server and select the data file content information. From Content Actions, click on Edit Data File.

The Site Studio Contributor window will pop up. I’ll select the Go to Page 2 and create a link.

Notice that $wcUrl(‘ExternalId’) is how we link our contributor data file to Page 2 on WebCenter Portal app. In this case we have $wcUrl(‘page2’).

Moving back to JDeveloper, we’ll drop the data file from our UCM connection into panelCustomizable in home.jspx, then select Content Presenter to render it.

Once the Edit Task Flow Binding window pops up, you’ll see the datasource attribute already populated, where MyContentServer is the name of our UCM connection and DF_BLOG is the dDocName of our data file. Next, we’ll inform who the region template is in the templateView attribute, and put the true value for the regionTemplate attribute.

Voilà! We’re ready to run the app.

WebCenter Spaces

Spaces already provide an ExternalId property when editing a Navigation item, which makes our lives a little bit easier.

Regarding navigation inside the same UCM data file, there’s no need to change anything in your code. Content Presenter is smart enough to identify that you are making reference to another data file.

The Magic of Declarative Components

2010-10-14T21:00:00.000-07:00

While working on a PoC I came across an interesting use case where no component would meet the customer’s requirement. Basically, it should look like a panelTabbed or a navigationPane, but instead of having a single text on the tab it should also display some links in the tab area.
I believe some folks would have though about creating a new JSF component. In my humble opinion it’s no easy task. Before taking this bumpy road, we should try to map each piece of this supposedly little monster to smaller existing ADF components. If we can successfully do that, then we have a clear case of declarative components.
The picture below, which is the actual component, is the result of 3 separate declarative components.

The first declarative component represents the tab itself. It has 3 command links, where the first one is the main title and the other ones are only subtitles. Notice that, for reusability purposes, every item has its own style class as an attribute. Plus, the javascript responsible for the “hover over behavior” is also declared into the same component.

The second is the body of the tab where content is displayed. I added an attribute to work as the content title, plus a facet to enable any type of content to be dropped into it.

And the third one will hold together both tab and body into the header and body facets respectively.

The next picture shows how to put together the 3 declarative components (dc) in order to achieve the desired layout. Notice that for each tab we have a tabBody dc.

The source code can be downloaded here.

Floating an image to the right

2010-10-08T11:42:00.000-07:00

Today I found this interesting question on the WebCenter Framework forum.
How can I accomplish such layout using ADF Layout Managers?
So here goes the code.

ADF and JQuery working together

2010-08-20T13:26:00.000-07:00

Are you done with your schedule builder for Oracle Open World 2010? Don’t forget to register for Pretty UIs: creating great looking applications with ADF Faces (S316896). Different from last year’s presentation Maiko Rocha and myself are not going to be focusing on ADF Faces Layout Managers and Skinning. This time it’s more about tips and techniques on how to make you UI components more dynamic and reusable.

Just to give you a taste of what we’re going to present I’ve prepared a sample application where I use JQuery with ADF Faces to create a slideshow. This sample has no HTML, of course... Otherwise it would be too easy. :)

If I had to create this app in html it would look like this:

   1: <!DOCTYPE html PUBLIC "-//W3C//DTD XHTML 1.0 Transitional//EN" 
                            "http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml1/DTD/xhtml1-transitional.dtd">

   2: <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml">

   3:     <head>

   4:         <meta content="text/html; charset=iso-8859-1"

   5:               http-equiv="Content-Type"/>

   6:         <script type="text/javascript" src="lib/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"></script>

   1:  
   2:         <script type="text/javascript" src="javascript/slide.js">
</script>

   7:         <link rel="stylesheet" type="text/css" href="css/slide.css"/>

   8:     </head>

   9:     <body>

  10:         <div id="slideshow">

  11:             <img src="images/cristo1.jpg" alt="" class="active"/>

12:

  13:             <img src="images/cristo2.jpg" alt=""/>

14:

  15:             <img src="images/ipanema1.jpg" alt=""/>

  16:         </div>

  17:     </body>

  18: </html>

So, the question is… How do I turn html tags into ADF Faces Layout Managers? There’s a tip here. PanelGroupLayouts can be easily mapped to html tags according to the layout attribute value you chose.

Layout	HTML Tag
default	span
horizontal	table
vertical	div
scroll	div (overflow: auto, height: 100% and width: 100%)

Which means that in ADF terms the code would be:

   1: <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>

   2: <jsp:root xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page" version="2.1"

   3:           xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core"

   4:           xmlns:h="http://java.sun.com/jsf/html"

   5:           xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich">

   6:   <jsp:directive.page contentType="text/html;charset=UTF-8"/>

   7:   <f:view>

   8:     <af:document id="d1" title="ADF plus JQuery">

   9:       <af:form id="f1">

  10:         <af:resource type="javascript"

  11:                      source="/lib/jquery/jquery-1.3.2.min.js"/>

  12:         <af:resource type="javascript" source="/javascript/slide.js"/>

  13:         <af:resource type="css" source="/css/slide.css"/>

  14:         <af:panelGroupLayout id="slideshow" layout="vertical">

  15:           <af:group>

  16:             <af:image source="/images/cristo1.jpg" id="i1" styleClass="active"/>

  17:             <af:image source="/images/cristo2.jpg" id="i2"/>

  18:             <af:image source="/images/ipanema1.jpg" id="i3"/>

  19:           </af:group>

  20:         </af:panelGroupLayout>

  21:       </af:form>

  22:     </af:document>

  23:   </f:view>

  24: </jsp:root>

Also notice the use of af:group. Not surrounding your images with af:group will cause ADF to create a separate div for each image inside your PanelGroupLayout.

Want to know more details? Attend our session. See you in OOW 2010. ;)

ADF Docs for Skinning, Tags, JavaScript and much more.

2010-08-06T10:42:00.001-07:00

This week two Oracle Partners contacted me with questions regarding ADF Skinning. They wanted to know some specific pseudo-class for a selector. In their case, Firebug was not enough. Firebug will not list a pseudo-class that is not being currently used in your page.
So, there’s a link that a few people know that lists all ADF Skin Selectors, Trinidad Javadoc, Rich Javadoc, Rich Javadoc for JavaScript and Tag Documentation. The main link is here. Have fun! Don’t forget to bookmark the tag guide as well. It’s not a complete reference, but it’s pretty useful.

Another undocumented tag on WebCenter Spaces

2010-07-21T16:48:00.001-07:00

If you've ever downloaded the Spaces Customization project from OTN, you might have tested it choosing myskin as the default application skin and SampleSiteTemplate as the default template for Group Spaces and Personal Spaces. When doing so and selecting a specific user, I’ll use monty for this post, you'll see a tab with monty's Profile Gallery and a panel box entitled Pages on the left with links to monty's Profile Gallery pages.

Monty's Profile Gallery

Once you navigate to vicky's Profile Galery, the panel box title still says Pages and shows the same list of pages, nevertheless the links point to vicky's Profile Galery. It turns the navigation through profiles a bit confusing. Notice also that I haven't signed out from monty’s account. I was only viewing vicky's profile page.

Switching to vicky's Profile Gallery

Vicky's Profile Gallery

The easiest solution, and the one also requested by a customer was to replace the title Pages by <User>'s Gallery. It can be easily achieved by using the following EL:

<af:panelBox text="#{o_w_w_i_v_b_resourceViewerBean.userDisplayName}'s Gallery" showDisclosure="false">
...
</af:panelBox>

That's how it should look now:

Vicky's Gallery

Hope this helps in the future.

ADF Pivot Table

2010-07-20T11:32:00.001-07:00

Last week I was helping a customer improve the looks of their Pivot Table. They had a couple of questions that took me sometime to investigate and get to a final answer.

Question #1 Is it possible to insert a link in the table header value? Can I stamp another pivot table cell on the same goLink?
Answer Yes, it is possible. The headerCell tag plus a switcher will do the job of stamping the goLink to a specific cell, in this case city. However, there’s no built-in EL syntax to reference other pivot table cells, therefore I took the approach of using oracle.adf.view.faces.bi.model.DataModel and oracle.dss.util.DataAccess to look up values in other cell inside a managed bean (line 12).

Code Snippets




   1:          <dvt:pivotTable id="pivotTable1"
   2:                          value="#{bindings.PlaceholderDataType.pivotTableModel}"
   3:                          styleClass="width:100%;" var="cellData"
   4:                          varStatus="cellStatus" binding="#{pageFlowScope.ptBean.pt}">
   5:            <dvt:headerCell>
   6:              <af:switcher facetName="#{cellData.layerName}"
   7:                           defaultFacet="Default" id="s1">
   8:                <f:facet name="city">
   9:                  <af:group id="g1">
  10:                    <af:goLink text="#{cellData.label}" id="gl1"
  11:                               targetFrame="_blank"
  12:                               destination="#{pageFlowScope.ptBean.findURL[cellData.label]}"/>
  13:                  </af:group>
  14:                </f:facet>
  15:                <f:facet name="Default">
  16:                  <af:outputText value="#{cellData.label}" id="ot2"/>
  17:                </f:facet>
  18:              </af:switcher>
  19:            </dvt:headerCell>
  20:          </dvt:pivotTable>

   1:  import oracle.adf.view.faces.bi.component.pivotTable.UIPivotTable;
   2:  import oracle.adf.view.faces.bi.model.DataModel;
   3:  import oracle.dss.util.DataAccess;
   4:  import oracle.dss.util.DataMap;
   5:   
   6:  private UIPivotTable pivotTable;
   7:  ...
   8:  DataModel dm = pivotTable.getDataModel();
   9:  DataAccess da = dm.getDataAccess();
  10:  ...
  11:  List myList = (List)da.getValue(2, 1, DataMap.DATA_AGGREGATES);
  12:  ...

Question #2 Can we display the titles for the categories? For instance, on the picture below, right above 2007 and Tents, it should display Time and Product. Currently, it only happens when the user hovers over its mouse.

Answer Unfortunately, this feature is currently not implemented. If you are reading this post and also has the same need, please leave a comment below detailing your requirement.

Deploying an Consuming Task Flows as Shared Libraries on WLS

2010-04-19T18:04:00.001-07:00

A Java EE library is an easy way to share one or more different types of Java EE modules among multiple Enterprise Applications. A shared Java EE library can be a simple jar file, an EJB module or even a web application module.

There are also other ways of sharing Java modules, such as optional packages and system libraries. This last one is not recommended if you need to update your JARs periodically. Since, you must reboot all servers in the domain in order for applications to pick up the change. So what's is the difference between optional packages and shared libraries? Well, basically optional packages are plain jar files that are used when you need to share one or more Java classes among different Java modules, whilst a shared library can be plain JAR file, an EAR file, or a WAR file. This means that Java EE and WLS deployment descriptors contained on the shared libraries will be merged in memory with the ones in the consumer applications. The sample I created for this post follows the same strategy as WebCenter Spaces. If you've extended Spaces before, you know that it's done through a WAR file (custom.webcenter.spaces.war) that is deployed as a shared library and consumed by Spaces application (webcenter.ear).

Shared Library Application

The SharedLibSample application is divided into 2 projects. MyTaskFlows project holds all task flows that will be deployed as ADF Libs and MyWar will wrap one or more ADF Libs into a WAR file, that is the actual shared library final artifact. Notice that MyWar has 2 deployment descriptors (web.xml and weblogic.xml), but in this use case I'm only including the weblogic.xml file, where I specify an empty context-root.

I'm also adding a new MANIFEST.MF file into the war deployment profile to tell WLS that it's a shared library: Manifest-Version: 1.0 Created-By: George Maggessy Implementation-Title: Sample Shared Library Extension-Name: sample.shared.lib Specification-Version: 1.0.0 Implementation-Version: 1.0.0 Implementation-Vendor: Oracle The name in bold will be used as a reference in the consumer application.

Enterprise Application

After the shared library has been deployed, it's time to build the Enterprise Application that references the library. I created a simple Fusion Web Application with a couple of jsf pages and included the generated ADF Library in the consumer application classpath. Attention to the fact that I did not include the WAR file itself, but the ADF Lib that goes inside that artifact.

Change the application's view perspective by selecting Navigator Display Options -> Show Libraries to help you consume the ADF Task Flows inside the shared libraries.

You should see something like this:

You are now ready to drag and drop the task flows into your JSF pages. Before deploying your application, make sure you added a reference to the shared library in the weblogic-application.xml deployment descriptor.
<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?> <weblogic-application xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application/1.0/weblogic-application.xsd" xmlns="http://www.bea.com/ns/weblogic/weblogic-application"> <listener> <listener-class>oracle.adf.share.weblogic.listeners.ADFApplicationLifecycleListener</listener-class> </listener> <listener> <listener-class>oracle.mds.lcm.weblogic.WLLifecycleListener</listener-class> </listener> <library-ref> <library-name>adf.oracle.domain</library-name> </library-ref> <library-ref> <library-name>sample.shared.lib</library-name> </library-ref> </weblogic-application> And, of course, remove the share lib jar file from your final EAR artifact.

Mapping WebCenter Spaces Site Template

2010-03-12T08:37:00.001-08:00

I had a student in the last Oracle A-Team's WebCenter bootcamp that gave me the brilliant idea of mapping all WebCenter Spaces components listed on the Site Template white paper, available on OTN, to some Spaces' screenshots in order to help them quickly identify which component on screen is actually the one referenced in the document.

So here goes the cheat sheet...

1. Login Link

2. Logout Link
3. Copyright Message
4. RSS Link
5. Contact Administrator Link
6. Privacy URL Link
7. Group Space Switcher
8. Administration Link
9. Page Navigation - Tab View or Page Navigation - List View
10. Group Space Navigation - Tabs View
11. Personal Space Link
12. Tagging Button
13. Linking Button
14. Manage Pages Link
15. Create Page Link
16. Search Box
17. Preferences Link
18. Favorites

19. Create Group Space Link

20. Group Space Subscribe Link

21. Group Space UnSubscribe Link

22. Group Space Email Members Link

Easing the skinning process

2010-03-02T12:19:00.001-08:00

Skinning is not an easy thing, since there aren't many docs out there to help us with this process, let alone detailed ones. My Faces does a pretty good on documenting skinning, but it's almost impossible to cover every single different selector, pseudo-classes, and pseudo-elements.

However, there is a simple trick that helps us discover which selector we need to change to achieve our desired look and feel. Basically, we only need to add a parameter in the web.xml file:

<context-param>
<param-name>org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.DISABLE_CONTENT_COMPRESSION</param-name>
<param-value>true</param-value>
</context-param>

You can do the same thing on the Extending Spaces application. Noticed that we are changing the web.xml file under CustomWebCenterSpacesWAR project:

Once you've done the change, redeploy your app and with the help of our best friend, Firebug, let's check how the selectors' name look like now.

On the botom right panel you can see classes like .af_panelTabbed_tab, .af_panelTabbed_tab-content, and .af_panelTabbed_tab-text-link, which can be converted into jsf selectors using the following rule:

.adf becomes af| and _panelTabbed_ becomes panelTabbed::

Using this simple rule, classes like .af_panelTabbed_tab-text-link turn into af|panelTabbed::tab-text-link; the same way .af_navigationPane-buttons_link:hover becomes af|navigationPane-buttons::link:hover. All the attributes that can be applied to those selectors follow the CSS3 rules.

Skinning ADF Table

2010-01-26T13:58:00.001-08:00

After a long time without any posts this is going to be a pretty quick one. An SC asked me last week how to remove the header and grid from an ADF Table. Well, skinning is something not really well-documented, so I decided to quickly show how to go from here

to here

First of all remove the header text from the columns of your table then add the following lines to your skin css file:


/*Removes outer border*/
af|table {
border:none;
}
/*Removes gray background from cells*/
af|column::banded-data-cell {
background:#FFFFFF;
}
/*Removes grid*/
.AFTableCellDataVHGrid:alias {
border:none;

I hope this will help as a quick reference on your future implementations. For more details go to Oracle ADF Faces Rich Client Components.

Source code.

Oracle UCM with WebLogic Embedded LDAP

2009-12-09T13:59:00.000-08:00

This post is a continuation of Installing WebCenter Suite 11g on Linux for Development and Oracle Discussions Configuration.

Just follow these 3 steps:

1. Access Oracle Content server main page, if you followed my instructions it would be http://servername:7777/cs, and login as sysadmin. Default password is idc. Once you are logged in, go to the section Administration and click on Providers.

2. Add a new ldapuser.

3. Insert the values below accordingly. That's it.

I'll soon talk about WebCenter Wikis and Blogs configuration.

Meet you at Oracle Open World 2009

2009-09-26T10:35:00.000-07:00

This year I'll have the honor of presenting Introducing Oracle WebCenter Suite 11g (S311628) with Vince Casarez, VP of Product Management, and Vineet Duggal, Senior Development Manager. Don't miss our presentation.

You can also find me at the WebCenter Demopod and Handson lab. I believe Demopods are the best opportunity you have to meet WebCenter Product Managers, discuss about the product and get some advices on how to implement your solution.

If you are looking for more info on ADF, stop by at Oracle OpenWorld Unconference. There'll be lots of ADF gurus sharing their experience and demoing some pretty interesting use cases. Maiko Rocha and myself will show a Facebook and Yahoo Mail sites built on ADF.

I'm looking forward to see you there.

MDS in a Nutshell

2009-09-23T00:34:00.000-07:00

MDS or Oracle Metadata Services is one of the most unknown and misunderstood features on Oracle FMW. For most folks it is a black box. But now I want to clarify what it is about and how you can take advantage of it.
Being really simplistic, MDS is a repository that contains all metadata related to your customizable application. Those customizations could be:

Seeded customization. This one happens at deployment time. All customizations are carried inside a MAR file on your artifact.
User personalization.
Design time at Runtime, aka, Composer, aka, Business Dictionary.
SOA composite application.

At runtime, all your customizations are retrieved by MDS and applied to the base application, revealing the final customized app.
A customizable application can have multiple customization layers. For instance: retail_stores and electronic_stores. Each layer can also have multiple layer values. For instance, electronic_stores can have the following values: BestBuy and Frys. Usually, we only apply one of those values at a time in runtime. Inside a Customization class we could check whether the user is a BestBuy or Fry's employee and apply the appropriate look and feel to the website. I promise I'll get into more details in a future post.

MDS Structure

MDS can be a file-based or database-based repository. On development environment, to avoid waste of resources, you should use the file-based version. And on production environment, Oracle strongly recommends to use a database-based version to take advantage of the many added features such as versioning and atomic transaction.
By default, WebCenter comes with 2 MDS repositories already setup, one for OWSM and the other for Spaces. If you are deploying a new application, in my personal opinion, it's a good practice to create a new MDS repository and register it on Enterprise Manager. Let's talk about 2 important concepts before moving to deployment: partition and label.

Partition

Partition is an independent logical repository inside an MDS repository. A single MDS repository can have multiple partitions and each partition can be associated with more than one application. I do not recommend this approach, because it can make your life harder while managing application's metadata. Try to keep "1 app equals 1 partition". You can create, delete, clone, import and even export a partition to move the metadata from one environment to the other (test to production).

Label

A label represents a metadata state. Inside a partition you can have many labels. If you create a new label you basically take a snapshot of your current metadata state. You can also delete labels and promote them, making an old label the current version.

Deployment

As a predeployment task you choose which MDS repository schema and partition will host your application metadata. Once you have your application successfully deployed, a label gets automatically created. It should look like this: postDeployLabel_MyWebCenterApp_1170408561. If you change any customization values, such as a web service endpoint, those changes do not adhere to the current label. So, a new label needs to be created to hold the current state of the application metadata.
If something unexpected occurs there is alway a chance of getting back to the previous version. Remember, that MDS has a version control mechanism. The only thing you have to do is to promote back the previous label.
For more detailed information please read Managing the Oracle Metadata Repository.

Initial Context Factory	weblogic.jndi.WLInitialContextFactory
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User	weblogic
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