- Extending WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.8 Made Easy. If you had a chance to extend WebCenter Spaces previous to 11.1.1.8 Portal release, you perhaps would agree - it was not that easy. Good news - with the latest WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.8 release, extending WebCenter Portal process became simpler and more stable. There is special JDeveloper application template provided, designed to extend WebCenter Portal with custom ADF Task Flows and Java code. You can read more about it in WebCenter 11.1.1.8 Developer guide here. Check how complicated it was to extend WebCenter Spaces before - What Else Can Go Wrong when Extending WebCenter Spaces.
Download - webcenter_extend_ps7.zip
- Red Samurai MDS Cleaner V2.0. Here we go, you can download Red Samurai MDS Cleaner V2.0. This tool is designed to work with plain ADF applications, as well as with WebCenter Portal or WebCenter Spaces applications. It allows to delete and edit corrupted or obsolete MDS entries. Functionality summary - search, view, edit and delete MDS customizations for ADF/WebCenter applications. Why we need such tool - MDS is black box and is really hard to revert to correct state when user creates corrupted MDS customizations or MDS breaks by itself. Red Samurai MDS Cleaner is designed to help Oracle Fusion administrators to resolve MDS related issues quickly. There are many ways how to break MDS, user don't need to be Chuck Norris to break it, you know it. We are here to help you.
Download - mdsv2_20120331.zip
- ADF Data Control Fix for BPM 11g Human Tasks. There is one thing worth to know about auto-generated ADF Data Control from BPM 11g Human Task. JDeveloper assigns same root package names for different BPM 11g Human Task projects, this hides ADF Data Control entry from Data Control window and prevents ADF developer from using it. Reproduced with JDeveloper 11g PS4. Workaround - manually refactor DataControls.dcx file into unique root folder.
Download - ResourceAllocationProcessApp.zip
- How To Disable Action Conditionally from Action Listener. There are use cases, when we want to control command component action execution, based on logic from action listener. If some conditions implemented by action listener are met, we would like to prevent action execution. For today post, I will take example of WebCenter 11g PS3/PS4 navigation and explain how to prevent pprnav action, when there are unsaved changes in the system.
Download - EnterprisePortalApp_v10.zip
- Integrating UCM Wiki Content Presenter into WebCenter 11g PS3/PS4. WebCenter 11g PS3/PS4 is able to store and retrieve Wiki content directly to and from Oracle UCM Content Server. Thats really good improvement comparing with early WebCenter releases, because there is no need to run separate server just to maintain static Wiki content. However, there are few tips and tricks to know, when integrating and making it work together with WebCenter Portal Framework application. This post will explain how to publish static Wiki content inside WebCenter Portal Framework application with the help of WebCenter Content Presenter ADF Task Flow.
Download - EnterprisePortalApp_v8.zip
- Making It Work Together - MDS User and Seeded Customizations. MDS is one of the most powerful and important elements of ADF/WebCenter framework. Users can perform ADF UI personalizations on runtime through MDS, as well as developers can implement seeded MDS customizations on design time and modify ADF components for different targets. However, if you would try to enable and run both options together - MDS User and Seeded Customizations, it will not work out of the box. My today post is about how to make it work together.
Download - EnterprisePortalApp_v7.zip
- Solving WCUserProfile Class Loader Error for WebCenter PS3/PS4 ADF Applications. While helping to migrate several WebCenter applications to WebCenter PS3/PS4, several times I saw same issue related to WebCenter User Profile - WebLogic Class Loader was failing to load WCUserProfile class. Symptoms: when opening any WebCenter task flow with embedded User Profile functionality, it throws loader constraint violation: loader (instance of weblogic/utils/classloaders/GenericClassLoader) previously initiated loading for a different type with name "oracle/webcenter/peopleconnections/ profile/WCUserProfile" error.
Download - WebCenterUserProfileApp_v2.zip
- How To Handle Web Browser Buttons in ADF/WebCenter Applications. ADF/WebCenter technology typically is used to implement transactional logic and transfer desktop applications functionality into web browser. Based on this, many questions can be asked, for example - what will happen if user press browser Refresh button during pending transaction or what will happen if browser will be closed at all during transaction. We are not asking same questions for pure web type applications, but ADF/WebCenter is different case. There is no 100% working option to control web browser buttons and to disable them from inside of our application, this would break browser security and allow hackers to lock users into specific web site. We can try to clear browser cache, etc. - but this is not working with ADF/WebCenter applications. However, there is option to inform user proactively about browser related even, that can potentially break application functionality, for example - browser will be closed, page will be refreshed by Refresh button, etc. We can catch these events and warn user from ADF/WebCenter application. I will describe in this blog post, how to implement such warning.
Download - EnterprisePortalApp_v5.zip
- Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3/PS4 Workaround for User Session Timeout Error 404. Most of you who are developing/using WebCenter 11g PS3/PS4 apps, probably noticed one annoying behavior related to user session timeout - Error 404 Resource not Found. Starting from ADF 11g PS3, user session timeout is handled by ADF with a new session timeout warning functionality. By default, 2 minutes before session expiry, ADF informs user to resume activity, if no action was taken after 2 minutes another warning message will inform about session timeout. Once user comes back and press OK for session timeout warning - automatic redirect happens to landing login page, this behavior is controlled by ADF Security. Read more about session timeout warning functionality from Frank Nimphius blog - How-to enable user session time out warning (JDev 11.1.1.4). While this works well with ADF, it doesn't want to work so well with WebCenter. Mainly because WebCenter navigation model prevents ADF Security to redirect successfully to login page. However, I have found workaround for WebCenter project as well, you are free to use it, until it will be fixed in future versions.
Download - EnterprisePortalApp_v4.zip
- Extending WebCenter 11g PS3/PS4 ADF Task Flows - RSS Example. Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3/PS4 allows to extend standard WebCenter product task flows, original Oracle library files are not modified - all customizations are stored inside MDS repository. Thats really powerful feature, quite often we can hear customer requests to customize one or another item for out-of-the box functionality. Because all changes are stored inside MDS, we are safe when doing migrations from one WebCenter release to another, just need to apply previous MDS. As per documentation - 24 Customizing Task Flows, only View level customizations are supported in current release. Will be waiting for ADF Model and Controller layers to be supported as well.
Download - EnterprisePortalApp_v3.zip
- Oracle WebCenter 11g PS3 ADF Security Login Bean. When you generate new WebCenter 11g PS3 Portal Framework application in JDeveloper 11g, it creates login/logout pages and configures ADF Security. However, it generates basic login page, this can be improved by using new WebCenter 11g PS3 security login bean. With WebCenter 11g PS3, we have out of the box bean (o_w_s_l_LoginBackingBean), which can handle login/logout functionality without writing any custom code.
Download - EnterprisePortalApp_v2.zip
- Initializing ADF Task Flow Parameters Through WebCenter PS3 Menu Model. Last week I was integrating ADF Task Flows into WebCenter PS3 menu model, there is one trick to share related to WebCenter PS3 Composer custom catalog integration and ADF Task Flow parameter initialization. In WebCenter PS3 you can integrate ADF Task Flows mainly in two ways - through WebCenter menu model or through WebCenter Composer custom catalog. Sounds clear, but ADF Task Flow parameters are initialized differently, I guess is a bug in current release. The thing is, parameters are not initialized with WebCenter Composer, as initialized when using WebCenter menu model. However, it still possible to make it work also with WebCenter Composer, I wil describe how.
Download - WebCenterTaskFlowParams.zip
- Practical Guide for Oracle WebCenter PS3 Security Implementation. This article is about best practices for WebCenter PS3 security implementation. Provided information is not necessarily complete, I will post updates in my future posts. Main goal is to give sample start-up application, it should help to jump start your WebCenter PS3 project and avoid certain level of beginner confusion. Sample application, is focused around secured landing page implementation and Login/Logout functionality. By default, auto-generated sample application based on WebCenter PS3 template from JDeveloper 11g doesn't have secured landing page. Every customer is wondering, where is a point to have landing page with anonymous access, this article will explain in detail how to fix this.
Download - EnterprisePortalApp_v1.zip
- Automated Single Sign-On through WebCenter PS3 External Application Connection. Every company maintains multiple Web applications, internal or external. In order to make these applications to work together, usually we need to enable Single Sign-On (SSO) for authentication. Typically, this can be very costly and requires advanced configurations. If you are building portal solution with WebCenter PS3, you may avoid complexity by leveraging External Application Connection feature. Read more about this feature from WebCenter Developer and Administration guides - 63.13 Working with External Applications and 25 Managing External Applications. As you can read from developer guide, automated SSO feature is supported for J2EE security container login method j_security_check for authentication. We did several tests with third-party Struts application, where custom made security check was implemented. It also works well, I will share our test results with you in this post.
Download - ExternalAppAccess.zip and struts-blank.zip
- WebCenter 11g PS3 Performance Tuning and Iterative Development Mode. If you don't know already, new WebCenter 11g PS3 supports by default Iterative Development mode. This mode allows more rapid development by reducing redeployment cycles, basically WebCenter catalog and MDS repository information is reloaded and reconstructed on each request. This makes all changes visible almost instantly. Iterative Development mode is supported only when running on embedded JDeveloper 11g WebLogic server. This means, even you will do deployment on standalone WebLogic server with Iterative Development mode enabled, it will be disabled automatically. However, it often happens when we need to do demo or run prototype from embedded JDeveloper 11g WebLogic server. If you are not aware about Iterative Development mode, most probably you will be wondering - 'why it works so slow'. Keep in mind, you should disable Iterative Development mode for better performance, when running on embedded JDeveloper 11g WebLogic server - 1.5.4 Turning Off Iterative Development. At the same time Iterative Mode is very useful during development phase, just don't forget to switch it off, when you will do demo to your boss ;-).
Download - WebCenterPerformance.zip
