New Features in Oracle Portal Release 3.0

Page Creation

Many Oracle Portal 2.x users have asked for a way to display data from different folders—even different Oracle Portal content areas or data from Oracle Portal applications—all on the same page. Oracle Portal 3.0 provides this capability by allowing you to create a page, configure it into areas called regions, then populate each region with portlets. A portlet is information from data sources called portlet providers.

You can create a portlet provider to make your legacy data available to Oracle Portal by coding to the guidelines set forth in the Oracle Portal Development Kit. By default, however, Oracle Portal provides you with a wide range of portlets: all of the objects contained within a Oracle Portal content area, including folders and all or just some of their regions, Oracle Portal forms and reports, a stock ticker, a weather forecaster, and so on. Pages are dynamically assembled and formatted according to the portlets and layout chosen for the page, thus ensuring access to the very latest information.

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Enhanced Content Publishing Features

Oracle Portal 3.0 greatly expands your ability to publish content on the Web. Not only do pages make it extremely simple to bring together diverse data in a single location, but 3.0 offers the following enhancements as well:

• Improved folder layout
• Better custom typing/attribution
• Item level security
• Upload multiple files
• Multi-language support
• Export/import scripts
• Enhanced searching capabilities

Improved folder layout

In Oracle Portal 3.0, the layout scheme for folders is extremely flexible. In 2.x, the navigation bar had to be placed along the left margin, and items appeared wherever their display options dictated (Quickpicks at the top, followed by Announcements, News items, and finally, Regular items). In 3.0, these restrictions have been lifted. A folder is now considered simply a set of regions containing items. The names of the regions, and how the data appears within them, is controlled by the folder style owner. And navigation bars can appear wherever you decide they're most useful.

Better custom typing/attribution

In 2.x, custom item types were based on one of the built-in item types (File, URL, Text, and so on). In 3.0, the content area administrator can create item types to suit a wide variety of needs, and can create the necessary attributes to support those types. For example, for a new type called Movie Review, the content area administrator might define a set of attributes including Director, Actor, Release Date, Rating, and so on. Each of these attributes can be designated mandatory or optional. The content area administrator can also create additional folder types.

Item level security

In 2.x, access to content was controlled at the folder level. In 3.0, individual items within a folder can be controlled just as folders were in 2.x. Privileges may be extended to individual users or groups using new options available in the Item Wizard.

Upload multiple files

You can upload multiple files into one or more specified Oracle Portal folders by uploading and subsequently unzipping a Zip File item. By creating appropriate, descriptive directory and file names before zipping the files to be uploaded, you can provide meaningful folder and link names to guide users to the files they need to access.

Multi-language support

Although you could display a 2.x Oracle Portal development environment to one of 24 languages, none of the user-provided content was similarly translated. For example, if a 2.x user changed the browser language to French, only Site Builder-specific screens and labels appeared in French: Administration page and Managers, default logo, and so on. The user content remained in the language in which it was created. In 3.0, both the content area and its content are translatable.

Export/import scripts

Oracle Portal 3.0 provides a set of scripts so you can export a content area, including all of its dependencies, then import it into another instance of Oracle Portal. You can also export and import individual Oracle Portal components.

Enhanced searching capabilities

In 3.0, you can search for a string across all of Oracle Portal, or limit the search to a single content area, or even a specific folder, category, or perspective.

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Extended Application Building Features

• Enhanced application building model
• New security model
• Application export/import
• Enhanced components

Enhanced application building model

With Oracle Portal 3.0's new application model, multiple portal developers can work on the same application at the same time. An application is a group of integrated components, shared components, and database objects designed to solve a business need or task. For example, a human resources application might allow users to add new employee information or look up existing employees. The contents of this application might include:

• Form components, which allow users to add new employees, update employee data, track vacation, and so on.
• JavaScript shared components, which validate entry fields in the form.
• Reports, which let users look up existing employee information, view an organizational chart, and so on.
• A list of values on the report, which contains valid company job titles and departments.
• A link between the form and report.

In addition, whereas 2.x applications had to be exported by individual components, Oracle Portal 3.0 allows you to export the application and its components as a single entity.

New security model

In Oracle WebDB 2.x, security for components was enforced at the database schema level. You could build a component in any schema for which you had Build In privileges and access database objects in schemas for which you had Browse In privileges.

Oracle Portal 3.0 enforces security at the application level. An application maps to a single database schema that stores the components comprising the application. The schema can also store database objects, such as tables and views on which the components are based. An application owner can also access objects in other schemas, given the appropriate privileges.

Application export/import

In a single operation, you can export the entire contents of a Oracle Portal application to another database or database schema.

Enhanced components

You'll find the wizards that you use to create components similar to and as easy to use as those in Oracle WebDB 2.x. Oracle Portal 3.0 includes additional options to enhance the finished components:

• Custom Layouts: The Reports and Forms Build Wizards enable you to specify your own HTML code to lay out text, fields and buttons.
• Reports: In addition to custom layouts, you can display report data in a tabular layout (all table or view rows display in a single box) or form layout (data from each row displays in a separate box on the form). You can also use color, fonts, even blinking text to conditionally highlight particular rows and columns in reports.
• Simplified Query by Example (QBE) Reports: QBE Reports provide a single interface to query, insert, edit, and delete table or view data.
• Simplified and improved Master-Detail Forms

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Unified Schema and Interface

In 2.x, the pieces of the product for building applications and content areas occupied separate schemas and employed vastly different interfaces. In 3.0, the entire product inhabits a single schema, regardless of the number of content areas, pages, or applications you create. In addition, the entire user interface has been re-tooled to synthesize the product and make it easier to use.

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Single Sign-On

Each Oracle Portal page can include data from many different portlet providers, each of which can have their own log on procedures. To prevent you from being constantly confronted with user ID and password requests for each portlet provider, Oracle Portal provides a single sign-on feature. When you log on to Oracle Portal, it automatically logs you onto all registered portlet providers and subsystems.

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