Overview

At runtime, when a user logs in, the system determines the set of documents that makes up the user’s display profile document set. The Desktop internal implementation of the display profile (the part that interprets the display profile) determines this set by looking at all of the LDAP nodes that the user belongs to. This can be the organization DN (dc=sesta.com), suborganizations, role DNs (cn=Role1,dc=sesta.com), and uid (uid=user,ou=People,cn=Role1,dc=sesta.com), as well as the global display profile. The display profile documents from each of these LDAP nodes and global display profile are then read (if it exists there), and all of the documents are put into a set. The system sorts the set according to the document priorities. A lower number represents a lower priority. For example, a 1 is a lower priority than a 2. The documents are then sorted from lower number to higher number. See Process of Merging for more information on this process.

The user level document (uid=amAdmin,ou=People,...) is a special case referred to as the base document. Think of the base document as a priority equal to infinity. Thus, it is always the highest number (and hence highest priority). All of the mergers are associated with the base document in sorted order, and the priority setting on a user document is always the highest. The priority attribute used in the <DisplayProfile> tag takes the special keyword user to indicate that the current display profile is the user level display profile.

When a merge occurs, it starts at the lowest priority document (lowest number) and proceeds in increasing priority number, until it arrives at the user (base) document.

Thus, the implication of display profile document priorities is that what really matters is the priority number. For example, an organization level document can have a higher priority than a role level document, but it does not have to. It depends on how you need to prioritize these documents for your site.

Specify the display profile document priority in the XML file with the <DisplayProfile priority= syntax> tag. You can change the priority by directly editing the display profile XML by using the Sun Java System Portal Server console or by using the psadmin command to load the display profile.

Do not assign the same priority to two display profile documents. Doing so causes the Desktop to not appear properly. However, the product does not check for duplicate document priorities.