Web 2.0 Solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g

Transcription

1 Web 2.0 Solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g Plinio Arbizu Amit Gupta Ashok Aggarwal Sukanta Hazra Chapter No. 6 "Portlets"

2 In this package, you will find: A Biography of the authors of the book A preview chapter from the book, Chapter NO.6 "Portlets" A synopsis of the book s content Information on where to buy this book About the Authors Plinio Arbizu is member of Oracle ACE Director Program, sponsored by otn.oracle.com, which selects professionals in the world who have a strong technical level and commitment to Oracle technology diffusion. He has more than ten years of IT experience in projects using Oracle Technology, for commercial, pharmaceutical, and finance areas in companies like Bristol Myers Squibb Peru and Consite. Currently, he lives in Mexico and serves as a Senior Consultant in Deloitte Consulting. Also, he is an Official Oracle University Instructor in courses like JEE and Oracle WebCenter. Additionally, he has participated as a speaker and organizer of Oracle technology events in Colombia, Chile, Argentina, and Peru Plinio is a graduate of computer engineering at the Pontificia Universidad Catolica del Peru. You can follow him through his blog:

3 I begin by thanking James Lumsden, for the opportunity to write this book. His encouragement, support, and commitment were vital to complete this project. This book could never have happened without the guidance of our editor, Rakesh Shejwal, who has always been looking after our deliveries. Thanks for your coordination and collaboration in the technical reviews of each chapter. I would also like to acknowledge the Oracle WebCenter team; Vince Casarez and George Maggessy. They provided invaluable contributions with knowledge and tools. Special thanks to Leena Purkait, who from the beginning was following the development of each chapter. Her persistence and dedication was instrumental in completing the book. Finally, my gratitude to the whole team at Packt Publishing. Thanks for your effort and support in the publication of the book. Ashok Aggarwal has been delivering web-based collaboration, document management, content management, and workflow solutions using Oracle's products since before they were named Enterprise 2.0. As Oracle's offerings have matured and the market has grown, so has Ashok's involvement in the Oracle Fusion Middleware technology stack, leading to early adoption of Oracle WebCenter Suite 10g and 11g. Since 2002, Ashok has delivered robust solutions by leading a highly talented implementation organization, M&S Consulting. Prior to co-founding M&S, Ashok focused on delivery of enterprise applications and integration solutions at Accenture in a variety of industry verticals. Ashok has led innovative business transformation initiatives leveraging SOA, BPM, BI, Identity Management, and Enterprise 2.0 technologies as he works to solve today's most challenging business problems. He is a regular instructor and speaker at private and public events. Along with white papers and trade journal publications on Fusion Middleware, Ashok is co-authoring an Oracle SOA book and sponsoring technology and process publications for others on his team at M&S Consulting. Ashok holds a B.S. in Biomedical Engineering and a Minor in Computer Science from The Johns Hopkins University. To the talented and tireless M&S team, our wonderful customers, the Oracle E2.0 team, Packt Publishing, and, most importantly, my family and friends. All have supported me greatly in this process.

4 Amit Gupta has spent most of his career in high technology, media, and infrastructure. He currently leads the Enteprise 2.0 infrastructure and development team at M&S Consulting. Amit co-founded Affle Limited, which is a mobile media company with extensive operations in the Asia-Pacific region. While there, he helped to drive new product initiatives and helped to complete Microsoft's strategic investment in Affle. Prior to Affle, Amit worked at Bloomberg New York, and subsequently at Bloomberg London, helping to plan and implement major new projects such as "Bloomberg Anywhere" that helped to drive $500M+ in new revenues annually. While there, he also designed and implemented highly scalable system architectures that were used to support millions of users. Systems integration is his specialty. He is a technology enthusiast and likes to get his hands dirty with new projects. He has also spent time at various high-technology companies, developing and applying virtual reality applications, medical imaging algorithms, neural networks, and financial trading systems. Amit holds a B.S. in Computer Science (Honors) from The Johns Hopkins University (USA). To my supportive family, the Oracle Team, and Packt Publishing. This would not have been possible without you. Sukanta K. Hazra has a passion for technology and constant desire to try out new areas. This has taken him through academic research on wireless networks and networking protocols, mobile software development, mobile advertisement platforms, and enterprise software and architecture. His experience in various fields has given him a unique perspective on software development and the evolution of software and systems in the evolving technology landscape. Sukanta was one of the founding members of Affle Limited, which is a mobile media company with extensive operations in the Asia-Pacific region. At Affle, Sukanta led the development of their mobile software products, working on several mobile platforms. He also designed and led the implementation of Affle's mobile advertisement platform. Prior to Affle, he worked as a researcher in the field of wireless networks at the Institute for Infocomm Research, Singapore.

5 He has contributed several papers to IEEE conferences and journals. Sukanta considers himself to be a 'geek' and both enjoys tinkering with the guts of the system and is equally comfortable dealing with the high-level architectural view of the system. His current passion is Service-Oriented Architecture and the use of use of open standards and their consequent impact on the enterprise. Sukanta holds both a Masters degree in Engineering and a Bachelors degree (Honors) in Engineering from National University of Singapore. To the thousands of software engineers out there who are making it a better world for all of us. To my colleagues at M&S Consulting for their encouragement and helpful advice, and to Packt Publishing for their suggestions and patience. Thank you for making this possible.

6 Web 2.0 Solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g Oracle WebCenter Suite is the industry's most comprehensive enterprise portal platform designed for business users, unified with business applications, Enterprise 2.0 services, and social communities. It incorporates Web 2.0 content, collaboration, and communication services. However, without proper guidance on developing performance-critical enterprise applications, it is easy to make the wrong design and technology decisions. Packed with screenshots, this book offers you in-depth knowledge of developing custom WebCenter applications for your various enterprise requirements. Integrate various web services to make development simpler and faster. Build fast, reliable, and robust Web 2.0 applications with this hands-on practical tutorial. Oracle WebCenter Suite is a stack of products that helps implement Web 2.0 solutions in organizations. This book enables developers to learn the important concepts. It shows several scenarios where Oracle WebCenter 11g technology can be used to improve the productivity of your organization. Each chapter provides a practical application of the technology. It will guide you through many web-building features such as pages and portlets. Finally, the book describes complete solutions, such as Oracle WebCenter Spaces, and ready-to-use collaborative environments. What This Book Covers Chapter 1, What is Oracle WebCenter?, summarizes the features of Oracle WebCenter and shows the business needs that this technology solves. Chapter 2, WebCenter Installation and Configuration, provides the necessary instructions to install WEB Center Suite successfully in an environment standard of development. Chapter 3, Setting up the Development Environment, helps us to prepare the development environments and the application server, in order to support our WebCenter applications. Chapter 4, Getting Started with WebCenter Development: Hello World(s), helps us create a HelloWorld web service. We also accomplish a verification of our development environment and gain confidence in being able to build the foundational components and skills needed for WebCenter development.

7 Chapter 5, Design and Personalization, explains how to develop templates and add data access features to our WebCenter applications. Chapter 6, Portlets, explains how to implement features using portlets in our applications, as component reuse is one of principal goals of our applications. Chapter 7, Discussions, Wiki, and Blog Services, demonstrates simple ways to incorporate the Wiki and Blog Services into your custom WebCenter applications. Chapter 8, Search Service, explores the WebCenter Search Service, Tags, Links, and RSS. By creating a sample application, it explains how to integrate WebCenter Search Service into your custom WebCenter application. Chapter 9, Personalization with Oracle Composer, works with Oracle WebCenter in two parts. In the first part, as developers, we prepare the environment for end users. Then, we assume the role of end user to personalize the page defined in the previous step. Chapter 10, Oracle WebCenter Spaces Overview, shows how to configure and customize Oracle WebCenter Spaces.

8 Portlets In the previous chapter, we looked at how to build a page containing information on our example company's requirements, and the offers made by its suppliers. Now, we are interested in adding a chart to that page that graphically shows the status of requirements pending and closed, as a percentage. However, this graph will not only be required on this page but in many others. Therefore, it is necessary build this chart as a reusable component. In this kind of scenario, the technology of portlets can help us. A portlet is a component of software that can be part of a page. In consequence, a page can be enriched by many portlets allowing us to grab the contents of various sources of data. This chapter will help us to understand the concept associated with this technology and how it can apply to our projects with Oracle WebCenter. During this chapter, you will learn the following: JSF specification concepts The types of portlets you can build with WebCenter Developing a portlet using ADF Integrating portlets with custom Applications

9 Portlets Portlets, JSR-168 specification Specification JSR-168, which defines the Java technologies, gives us a precise definition of Java portlets: Portlets are web components like Servlets specifically designed to be aggregated in the context of a composite page. Usually, many Portlets are invoked to in the single request of a Portal page. Each Portlet produces a fragment of markup that is combined with the markup of other Portlets, all within the Portal page markup. You can see more detail of this specification on the following page: While the definition makes a comparison with servlets, it is important to note that the portlets cannot be accessed directly through a URL; instead, it is necessary to use a page-like container of portlets. Consequently, we might consider portlets as tiny web applications that return dynamic content (HTML, WML) into a region of a Portal page. Graphically, we could view a page with portlets as follows: Additionally, we must emphasize that the portlets are not isolated from the rest of the components in the pages, but can also share information and respond to events that occur in other components or portlets. [ 128 ]

10 Chapter 6 WSRP specification The WSRP specification allows exposing portlets as Web services. For this purpose, clients access portlets through an interface (*. wsdl) and get graphic content associated. Optionally, the portlet might be able to interact directly with the user through events ocurring on them. This way of invoking offers the following advantages: The portals that share a portlet centralize their support in a single point. The portlet integration with the portal is simple and requires no programming. The use of portlets, hosted on different sites, helps to reduce the load on servers. WebCenter portlets Portlets can be built in different ways, and the applications developed with Oracle WebCenter can consume any of these types of portlets. JSF Portlets : This type of portlet is based on a JSF application, which is used to create a portlet using a JSF Portlet Bridge. [ 129 ]

11 Portlets Web Clipping : Using this tool, we can build portlets declaratively using only a browser. These portlets show content from other sites. OmniPortlet : These portlets can retrieve information from different types of data sources (XML, CSV, database, and so on) to expose different ways of presenting things, such as tables, forms, charts, and so on. Content Presenter : This allows you to drop content from UCM on the page and display this content in any way you like or using a template. Ensemble : This is a way to "mashup" or produce portlets or "pagelets" of information that can be displayed on the page. Programmatic Portlets: Obviously, in addition to the previous technologies that facilitate the construction of portlets, it is also possible to build in a programmatic way. When we build in this way, we reach a high degree of personalization and control. However, we need specialized Java knowledge in order to program in this way. As we can see, there are several ways in which we can build a portlet; however, in order to use the rich components that the ADF Faces framework offers, we will focus on JSF Portlets. Developing a portlet using ADF The portlet that we will build will have a chart, which shows the status of the company's requests. To do this, we must create a model layer that represents our business logic and exposes this information in a page. Therefore, we are going to do the following steps: 1. Create an ADF application. 2. Develop business components. 3. Create a chart page. 4. Generate a portlet using the page. 5. Deploy the portlet. In this example, we use a page for the construction of a portlet; however, ADF also offers the ability to create portlets based on a flow of pages through the use of ADF TaskFlows. You can find more information on the following link: b31974/taskflows.htm#babdjedd [ 130 ]

12 Chapter 6 Creating an ADF application To create the application, do the following steps: 1. Go to JDeveloper. 2. In the menu, choose the option File New to start the wizard for creating applications. In the window displayed, choose the Application category and choose the Fusion Web Application ADF option and press the OK button. 3. Next, enter the following properties for creating the application: Name: ParacasPortlet Directory: c:\paracasportlet Application Package Prefix : com.paracasportlet [ 131 ]

13 Portlets 4. Click Finish to create the application. Developing business components Before starting this activity, make sure you have created a connection to the database. To recollect this process, see in Chapter 3, Setting up the Development Environment. 1. In the project Palette, right-click on Project Model, and choose New. 2. On the next page, select the category Business Tier ADF Business Components and choose Business Components from Tables. Next, press the OK button. [ 132 ]

14 Chapter 6 3. In the following page, you configure the connection to the database. At this point, select the connection db_paracas and press the OK button. 4. In order to build a page with a chart, we need to create a read-only view. For this reason, don't change anything, just press the Next button. 5. In this next step, we can create updateable views. But, we don't need this type of component. So, don't change anything. Click the Next button. [ 133 ]

15 Portlets 6. Now, we need to allow the creation of read-only views. We will use this kind of component in our page; therefore select the table REQUEST, as shown next and press Next. 7. Our next step will allow the creation of an application module. This component is necessary to display the read-only view in the whole application. Keep this screen with the suggested values and click the Finish button. 8. Check the Application Navigator. You must have your components arranged in the same way as shown in the following screenshot: [ 134 ]

16 Chapter 6 9. Our query must determine the number of requests for status. Therefore, it will be necessary to make some changes in the created component. To start, double-click on the view RequestView, select the Query category, and click on the Edit SQL Query option as shown in the following screenshot: [ 135 ]

17 Portlets 10. In the window shown, modify the SQL as shown next and click the OK button. SELECT Request.STATUS, COUNT(*) COUNT_STATUS FROM REQUEST Request GROUP BY Request.STATUS 11. We only use the attributes Status and CountStatus. For this reason, choose the Attributes category, select the attributes that are not used, and press Delete selected attribute(s) as shown in the following screenshot: [ 136 ]

18 12. Save all changes and verify that the view is similar to that shown next: Chapter 6 Creating a chart page Once we have completed the stage of building the model, we will create the page that hosts our chart. 1. In Application Navigator, right-click on the project ViewController, then choose New. [ 137 ]

19 Portlets 2. In the next window, select the category Web Tier JSF, select the option JSF Page, and click the OK button. 3. Then, we define the name of the page: requestgraph.jspx and press the OK button. [ 138 ]

20 Chapter 6 4. Now, locate the Data Controls palette and drag the view RequestView1 to the page. Then choose, from the context menu, the option Graphs in the same way as shown in the following screenshot: 5. Next, choose the Pie category and Pie type item, as shown next: [ 139 ]

21 Portlets 6. After the last step, a screen will appear that indicates the attributes used to populate the graph. Choose CountStatus in the Pie item and Status in the Slice. Press OK. 7. Finally, change the graphic appearance. To do this, once you have created the component, go to the Property Inspector, select the Appearance region and change the value of property Style to Comet and the 3D Effect to true as shown in the following screenshot: 8. Save all the changes. [ 140 ]

22 Chapter 6 Creating a Portlet using the page Now that we have our page, we will use it. 1. Go to Application Navigator and right-click on the page requestgraph.jspx and select Create Portlet Entry as shown in the following screenshot: 2. In the next window, change the names and descriptions of the portlet as shown next and click the OK button. Portlet Name: ParacasPortlet Display Name: ParacasPortlet Portlet Title : Requests by Status Short Title : Requests by Status Description: Requests by Status [ 141 ]

23 Portlets 3. This last step will be sufficient to create the portlet based on the data page. Click OK, then check that the files portlet.xml and oracle-portlet.xml are created as shown in the following screenshot: Portlet deployment 1. Once we have built our Portlet, it is necessary to include it in our Portal. To do this, we must obtain this portlet from a repository. To start with, we must ensure that the server is active. In order to start up this server, choose the menu option Run Start Server Instance. [ 142 ]

24 Chapter 6 2. The following message at the Console confirms that the server is initialized: DefaultServer started. 3. Right-click on the ParacasPortlet application and choose Deploy ParacasPortlet_application1 to IntegratedWLSConnection, in the same way as shown next: 4. In the next window, click the button OK to complete the process. [ 143 ]

25 Portlets 5. Finally, in order to check the deployment of portlet, go to the following page: This page shows the deployed portlet's information on the server and, amongst other things, provides links to the interface's WSRP. These interfaces are part of a specification-oriented communication between portlets. We'll use this interface to consume the portlet from other sites. Therefore, click on the link WSRP v2 WSDL and see this URL: [ 144 ]

26 Chapter 6 Consuming a portlet After the construction and deployment of the portlet, it's time for it to be re-used by another application. For this, it is necessary to create a reference to this portlet in the application that needs to use it. Let's see the steps for this integration: 1. In the Application Navigator, change the current application ParacasPortlet to the Paracas Application, which we were building in Chapter 5, Design and Personalization.. Alternatively, you can use the ParacasEndOfChapter5.zip file that is included in the code bundle of the book. 2. In the Application Navigator, locate the section Application Resources. Then, right-click on Connections and choose the New Connection WSRP Producer. [ 145 ]

27 Portlets 3. In the next window, rename the registration of the portlet to WsrpPortletParacas and click Next. 4. In the URL for the endpoint, type the URL associated with the previously deployed portlet and press Next Now, click the Finish button to complete the establishment of the connection to the portlet. [ 146 ]

28 6. Let's go back to the Application Navigator and double-click on the page requestmaterial to show it in the editor. Chapter 6 7. Subsequently, drag the Portlet reference Requests by Status to the customright region in the page, as shown next: [ 147 ]

29 Portlets 8. Right-click on the page and select Run in the Application Navigator. 9. Finally, the page will show the following result: [ 148 ]

30 Chapter 6 Summary This chapter has shown us the power of portlets, a mechanism that can be reused between pages. In this case, we have taken advantage of the JSF and wizards offered by JDeveloper to quickly build graphical components. In this chapter, we discovered the features offered by portlets as a technique of component reuse. Also, we applied this technology to build a portlet using JDeveloper. Next, we hosted the said component in a repository offered by Oracle WebCenter. Finally, we consumed this portlet through our Paracas portal, which we built earlier in this book. [ 149 ]

31 Where to buy this book You can buy Web 2.0 Solutions with Oracle WebCenter 11g from the Packt Publishing website: Free shipping to the US, UK, Europe and selected Asian countries. For more information, please read our shipping policy. Alternatively, you can buy the book from Amazon, BN.com, Computer Manuals and most internet book retailers.