WebLogic Portal provides a convenient, extensible mechanism for creating URLs to your portal resources in a portal Web project that can transfer from domain to domain without breaking, especially when server names and port numbers change. This URL-creation mechanism also lets you switch between secure and non-secure URLs (http and https).
The two pieces involved in creating portable URLs are:
The url-template-config.xml file contains multiple URL "templates," each with a unique name. Those template URLs contain variables such as url:domain and url:port that are read in from the active server. The <render:*Url> JSP tags have a "template" attribute in which you can specify the name of a URL template in url-template-config.xml.
The following examples show how the JSP tags use the templates to create URLs.
| url-template-config.xml | <render:resourceUrl> |
| The following is a sample URL template in url-template-config.xml. <url-template name="secure-url">
https://{url:domain}:{url:securePort}/{url:path}?{url:queryString}
</url-template>
|
The following is how the <render:resourceUrl> JSP tag would create a URL using the template. <% String reportpath = "reports/report1.html"; %> <a href="<render:resourceUrl template="secure-url" path="<%=reportpath%>"/>"> |
You can use any of the URL templates in url-template-config.xml provided by WebLogic Portal, and you can add as many templates as you want to the file.
The following variables are available for use in URL template building:
{url:domain} - Reads the name of the server from the current request.
{url:port} - Reads the listen port number of the server from the current request. (See Troubleshooting below.)
{url:securePort} - Reads the SSL port number of the server from the current request. (See Troubleshooting below.)
{url:path} - Reads the name of the Web application. The URLs to all resources in a Web application are relative to the Web application directory.
{url:queryString} - Reads a queryString variable for the URL.
If you are using a proxy server or switching back and forth between non-secure and secure ports, you may find that URLs do not resolve if you use the {url:port} or {url:securePort} variables. This is because the variables for those values are read from the request. For example, if a user in a non-secure port (port number 80) clicks a secure https link that was created with a URL template that uses the {url:securePort} variable, the port number of the request (80) is used for the {url:securePort} variable, which would create a secure request (https) on an non-secure port. The same could happen if a user on a proxy server (port 80) clicks a link to a resource outside the proxy server (port 443).
In both of those cases, you need to hard code port numbers in the URL templates to get URLs to resolve correctly.
The url-template-config.xml file automatically created in a portal Web project also contains URL templates and variables for WSRP portlets. These templates must remain in the file if you are going to be a WSRP producer.