Provisioning WPF based WP Composite Applications to Expeditor

Transcription

1 Provisioning WPF based WP Composite Applications to Expeditor Copyright International Business Machines Corporation All rights reserved. Sample walk through #2 in a series of articles describing use of WebSphere Portlet Factory on Rich Client Platforms. This sample walk through shows the basic steps and user interface used, when building, deploying and running a simple WebSphere Portal Composite Application that you wish to then provision to and run on the Lotus Expeditor platform. The models that were used for this sample walk-through are the WPF Property Broker portlet to portlet communication samples available off of the WPF samples site at: This walk-through assumes that you have read the WPF Rich Client Platform documentation, and the basic deploying and running a WPF portlet on Lotus Expeditor document associated with this series of WPF rich client platform sample walk-throughs. Other WPF walk through documents will be provided, to describe more complex scenarios such as building a composite application using WPF portlets directly within the Lotus Notes 8 Composite Application Editor. Prerequisites In order to follow along with this walk through, you must have: A working knowledge of building portlets with WebSphere Portlet Factory A working knowledge of deploying WPF portlets to WP, and wiring portlets with property broker. A working knowledge of creating a WebSphere Portal Composite Application. Read through the Overview of WebSphere Portlet Factory Rich Client Support and Building WebSphere Portlet Factory Web Application Bundles documents in the WPF help. Read through the first walk through article in this series on building and deploying a WPF portlet to Lotus Expeditor. Installed Lotus Expeditor Installed the optional Web Translator feature and Eclipse Java Development Tools features from the Lotus Expeditor platform Update Site, available with your Expeditor media. NOTE, if you are on Expeditor or later, this step should no longer be necessary. Open the File -> Application -> Install -> Search for new features to install menu/dialog Select Add Folder Location to add a disk/folder based update site pointing at <ExpeditorMedia>/desktop/updates/platform/ Select and install Web Container JSP Compiler Bridge and Eclipse Java Development Tools Installed WebSphere Portlet Factory or later. Installed WebSphere Portal or later Installed the NCI component of Lotus Expeditor to your WP or later portal installation. In the Expeditor media folder, there is a subfolder called nci. Make sure your local WebSphere Portal server is up and running Go to <ExpeditorMedia>/nci/install and execute setupwin32.exe See the Expeditor documentation or support, if you have any issues installing NCI. If successful, you should now have a Rich Client tab on the Edit Page Layout Portal page where you can view/set metadata related to provisioning composite applications/portlets to Expeditor. Note, the equivalent functionality is called SCI in the Notes media and documentation.

2 Setup Create a WebSphere Portlet Factory project Enable the Rich Client Platform support as described in the WPF rich client platform documentation, and in the first sample walk-through document in this series. Add the portlet to portlet communication sample models from the WPF samples site, to the project Deploy your portlet WAR to the WP6.0.1 or later that you have installed Expeditor NCI on. Build the rich client platform Web Application Bundle (WAB), feature and update site for your project, as described in the WPF rich client platform documentation, and in the first walk-through article in this series. Create a WebSphere Portal Composite Application and add the property broker source and target sample portlets to the composite application's main page. Wire the portlets together using the WP Property Broker Wiring tool. Optionally, go to Expeditor and install the portlet WAB like you did in the first article in this series. Note, you may use the automatic provisioning process using the updatesitelist described below as an alternative to manually installing the portlet WAB. You should now have a WP Composite Application (not just a portal page, it must be created as a portal composite application) running in WP that looks like the following, where clicking on a link in the source portlet on the left sends a property broker event to the portlet on the right asking it to display details about the selected record.

3 WebSphere Portal Rich Client Platform admin portlets The Lotus Expeditor NCI component that you installed to WebSphere Portal provides Rich Client Platform administration portlets, that let you set the feature information for the rich client platform WAB (s) associated with the portlets in a composite application, along with additional rich client platform information such as whether to show a given composite application page in the rich client platform's launch/open menu. WebSphere Portlet Factory and later pre-populates the portlet preferences used to specify the feature associated with WPF portlets, based on the information you specify in the WPF Rich Client Platform project properties dialog, so you won't have to enter all of that information again here. It is a good idea though, to go through the WP RCP Uis at least once though, to familiarize yourself with the settings associated with a composite application intended to be provisioned to rich client platforms. From your composite application's page, click on the right side of the page's tab (eg, PB Test Tab) and it'll bring up a drop-down menu from which you can select Edit Page Layout. If you have successfully installed the Expeditor NCI components (also referred to as SCI, in the Notes8 world), then you should have an additional tab for Rich Client, to the right of the Content and Wires tabs, like the following screen shot shows. You may want to select the Add to the launcher checkbox and then select ok to configure the application to show an item for this page in the rich client platform launch/ open menu. Below that, you'll notice that there are two entries, one for each of the WPF portlets on this composite application page.

4 Select the wrench icon for one of the portlets to see the settings describing the feature associated with the Web Application Bundle plugin (WAB) for the portlet. These are the settings that have been prepopulated via portlet preferences in the portlet.xml descriptor generated by WPF when it generated the portlet WAR from a rich client enabled project. You'll note that the provisioning URL setting is left blank by default. This is intentional and will be described later in this document.

5 Installing your WPF portlets to Expeditor When the composite application is provisioned from WebSphere Portal to Expeditor, the Portlet Web Application Bundle (WAB) corresponding to the Portlet WAR used on the Portal, must be made available to Expeditor, for use by that composite application. That may be accomplished either by preinstalling that Portlet WAB to Expeditor using the instructions describe in the first article in this series, or by configuring either Expeditor (following section) to know where the update site for the Portlet WAB is, or by setting the Feature URL to that WAB, in the Portlet Adapter Builder(s). Configuring Expeditor's Update Site List Assuming you have a locally installed/managed Lotus Expeditor, you may manually configure the update site configuration for the Expeditor platform by adding the following settings to: C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Expeditor\rcp\plugin_customization.ini... com.ibm.rcp.provisioning/uselist=true com.ibm.rcp.provisioning/usefeatureurl=true com.ibm.rcp.provisioning/updatesitelist=file:///eclipse/workspace/testpb/wpfexpeditorupdatesitetestp

6 where the value of the updatesitelist is a list of file or http based URLs to update sites. Remove the C: from Windows paths and use forward slashes. Make sure the path points to your project's generated rich client platform web application bundle update site. Start or restart Lotus Expeditor after adding the above information to its plugin_customization.ini initialization file. Notes8 copy of that file typically resides at: C:\notes\framework\rcp \plugin_customization.ini but Notes8 has other restrictions on update sites including server managed update sites, so please refer to your platform's documentation for more information on configuring update sites for the particular platform that you are using. Other means of configuring and managing update sites for other situations are described below and in your rich client platform's documentation. Please refer to your platform's documentation for more detailed instructions and options. Configuring Expeditor for your WebSphere Portal Lotus Expeditor provides a dialog for configuring a connection with WebSphere Portal via File -> Preferences -> Home Portal. Enter just the portion of your portal server's URL up through /wps and it should populate the other URLs for you. Setting this information allows Expeditor's Composite Application Catalog to query and show the list of WebSphere portal composite applications and to provision composite applications from portal down to the Expeditor rich client platform.

7 Expeditor Composite Application Catalog Choosing Portal Applications from the Lotus Expeditor Open menu brings up the portal composite application catalog such as the one shown in the figure below. In this screen shot you see a list of composite applications that I have previously created on the WebSphere Portal that is set as the Home Portal in my Expeditor's File -> Preferences Home Portal Account settings.

8 Double click or right click and select Open on the application that you wish to provision to Expeditor, and it should download the composite application definition from your portal to Expeditor (an XML definition of the application, sometimes referred to as caxml), and then try to provision features associated with the portlets in that composite application. How does Expeditor find the WAB Features for the Portlets? To determine which Eclipse/OSGi features are associated with the portlets in the composite application, the Expeditor provisioning mechanism looks for specific portlet preferences for each of the portlets in the composite application's pages, that define the feature id (or ids, if more than one feature is required), and version(s). Example portlet preferences describing an Eclipse/OSGi feature (Eclipse packaging for a Web Application Bundle / Plugin) associated with a portlet: <preference> <name>id.feature_0</name> <value>testpb</value> </preference> <preference> <name>version.feature_0</name> <value>1.0.0</value> </preference> To see more portlet preferences used in the provisioning process, look at the generated WEB-INF/ portlet.xml and the generated plugin.xml in your project after building a rich client WAB for your project. These preferences are set by WPF automatically, based on the values you entered in the project's Rich Client Platform properties dialog, so that you won't have to manually set them in portlet.xml or in WebSphere Portal via the Rich Client administration portlet available off of the composite application's Edit Layout page. You may view or change these settings in Portal via the rich client tab of the edit layout page, but there should be no need to do so in most cases. One portlet preference that WPF does not set by default is the Update Site URL of where to find the specified feature. The reason this is not set by default is that would then tie your portlet WAR to a specific update site for that feature (eg, the original developer's update site) and thus make it hard to move that portlet WAR and WAB update site between development, test, staging and deployment servers. Provisioning features for a composite application There are several ways that the Expeditor (and thus Notes 8.x) provisioning system locates features required for a composite application: If the feature update site URL is specified as a portlet preference, it may use that to download the feature from an update site while provisioning the composite application. For example, for one of my feature's update sites, rather than use a platform specified updatesitelist, I hardcoded the feature URL into the portlet preferences as a link to where I had moved an update site to my Apache Tomcat server's webapps/root folder. That feature was then provisioned from that

9 update site directly as specified in the composite application XML (which includes the portlet preferences) rather than from the platform's update site list as described in the following bullets. <preference> <name>url.feature_0</name> <value> </preference> If the following is set in the platform's plugin_customization.ini file, then the provisioning mechanism will use the ' ' separated list of URLs specified in the updatesitelist preference as update sites to provision features from (assuming the platform's managed server has not explicitly set an administrative list of update sites that must be used by all clients). C:\Program Files\IBM\Lotus\Expeditor\rcp\plugin_customization.ini... com.ibm.rcp.provisioning/uselist=true com.ibm.rcp.provisioning/usefeatureurl=true com.ibm.rcp.provisioning/updatesitelist=file:///eclipse/workspace/testpb/ WPFExpeditorUpdateSite file:///eclipse/workspace/taltview/wpfexpeditorupdatesitetaltview file:///eclipse/workspace/t58/wpfexpeditorupdatesitet58 In the above rich client platform plugin preference initialization file, I have asked the Expeditor provisioning framework to use a list of 3 file based URLs pointing into my Eclipse workspace at 3 projects that I have created update sites in. Note, the above file based URLs have had the C: removed from the path, and the backslashes replaced with forward slashes, to make them more standard URL form. There are 3 slashes following the file: protocol, since the first 2 are part of the file:// url prefix and the 3 rd is the / root of the disk's filesystem. You may also use http based URLs in the updatesitelist preference if you are hosting update sites on web and/or application servers. In a rich client platform server managed environment, a fixed list of update sites may be set by an administrator, which defines where platform feature updates may be downloaded from. The above manual configuration may not be allowed in such environments and you should refer to your platform's documentation on managing update site lists for more information in such cases. If the features required by the composite application are not found by the above means, but they had been previously installed (e.g., manually via the update manager), then the provisioning system may fall back and use the installed features, if they are a version that is compatible with the version specified in the portlet preferences. Note, provisioning will still try the configured update sites first, in case a newer (e.g., newer timestamp) compatible version may be found on an update site, before falling back to the previously installed features. While this sample walk-through article describes provisioning a composite application from WebSphere Portal to Lotus Expeditor, it is worth pointing out that with Lotus Notes 8.x composite application support, there is yet another way to provision a portlet WAB feature via update site to the platform, which is to use the Notes 8.x Composite Application Editor (CAE) to add the components to the CAE Palette from an update site. Refer to your Notes8 Composite Application Editor documentation for more information on building composite applications directly within the Notes8 client platform, and adding components to the palette from update sites.

10 Running the provisioned application Assuming the provisioning requests for the composite application and any features associated with the application's portlets were successful, you should be able to run the application (click Yes if asked to restart the platform). The following screen shot shows the composite application that had been created on WebSphere Portal and provisioned to Expeditor, with two WPF portlets wired together via Property Broker, now running in Lotus Expeditor with Expeditor's Property Broker sending portlet events from the portlet on the left, to the portlet on the right, just as it had in portal. On the left hand pane, you see a set of navigation links to page between the 4 portal pages in my composite application. Please refer to the related WPF on Rich Client Platform sample walk-through articles for more information on using WPF portlets in composite applications on rich client platforms.

11 Resources WebSphere Portlet Factory product documentation WebSphere Portlet Factory support developerworks WPF and WebSphere forums Lotus Expeditor Site Lotus Expeditor Support Site WPF Samples and Articles proddoc.html#samples Eclipse Article on Update Sites and Update Manager IBM Lotus Composite Application Blog IBM Lotus Composite Application Blog RSS feed More articles and documents on Lotus Expeditor and Notes may be found off the developerworks libary site at by selecting Lotus Expeditor or Lotus Notes as the product to search for documentation on, Trademarks DB2, IBM, Lotus, Tivoli, Rational, and WebSphere are trademarks or registered trademarks of IBM Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Windows and Windows NT are registered trademarks of Microsoft Corporation in the United States, other countries, or both. Java and all Java-based trademarks and logos are trademarks or registered trademarks of Sun Microsystems, Inc. in the United States, other countries, or both. Other company, product, and service names may be trademarks or service marks of others.