13 Adding Resources to Your Portal

When building up the content of your WebCenter Portal: Framework application, you can bring in content from various resources, including:

Pages
Portlets and pagelets
WebCenter Portal service task flows and custom task flows
Content from UCM
External applications

Adding content to your Framework application is no different from adding content to any other web application.

This chapter includes the following sections:

Section 13.1, "Adding Pages to Your Portal"
Section 13.2, "Adding Service Task Flows to Your Portal"
Section 13.3, "Adding Custom Task Flows to Your Portal"
Section 13.4, "Adding Content from Content Server to Your Portal"
Section 13.5, "Adding Portlets to Your Portal"
Section 13.6, "Adding Pagelets to Your Portal"
Section 13.7, "Adding External Applications to Your Portal"
Section 13.8, "Adding Data Controls to Your Portal"

13.1 Adding Pages to Your Portal

A portal is made up of pages that provide the structure of the portal and expose the content. If you create your portal using WebCenter Portal's Framework application template, a home page and several other pages are created for you. You can create your own pages to construct the rest of your portal.

For more information, see Section 5.3, "Adding Pages to a Portal."

After creating the pages, you can organize them into a page hierarchy to determine the structure of the pages. The page hierarchy also determines the security for those pages.

For more information, see Section 69.6, "Using the Page Hierarchy Security Editor."

If you want users to be able to edit pages at runtime, you can add Composer components to the pages.

For more information, see Chapter 20, "Enabling Runtime Editing of Pages Using Composer."

13.2 Adding Service Task Flows to Your Portal

WebCenter Portal services enrich portals and web sites with enterprise 2.0 capabilities, including social computing services, personal productivity services, online awareness and communications, content integration, and web analytics. WebCenter Portal services expose their functionality through task flows. For more information about WebCenter Portal services and task flows, see Section 2.4, "Introducing Oracle WebCenter Portal: Services."

If you create your portal using WebCenter Portal's Framework application template, all the appropriate WebCenter Portal service connection wizards and tag libraries are readily visible and available in the New Gallery and Component Palette. When you consume a WebCenter Portal service task flow or component, the necessary libraries are automatically added to the project. Depending on the service you plan to consume, your application must meet certain prerequisites. For example, if the service must know the identity of users, then your application must provide some level of security with user authentication. For more information, see Chapter 7, "Preparing Your Application for WebCenter Portal Services."

For more information about the individual WebCenter Portal services and their task flows, refer to Table 13-1.

Table 13-1 WebCenter Portal Services - More Information

WebCenter Portal Service	More Information
Activity Graph	Chapter 46, "Integrating the Activity Graph Service"
Analytics	Chapter 47, "Integrating the Analytics Service"
Announcements	Chapter 33, "Integrating the Announcements Service"
Blogs	Chapter 32, "Integrating Wikis and Blogs"
Discussions	Chapter 34, "Integrating the Discussions Service"
Documents	Chapter 30, "Integrating the Documents Service"
Events	Chapter 52, "Integrating the Events Service"
Instant Messaging and Presence (IMP)	Chapter 35, "Integrating the Instant Messaging and Presence Service"
Links	Chapter 43, "Integrating the Links Service"
Lists	Chapter 48, "Integrating the Lists Service"
Mail	Chapter 36, "Integrating the Mail Service"
Notifications	Chapter 49, "Integrating Notifications"
People Connections	Part VI, "Working with the People Connections Service"
Polls	Chapter 37, "Integrating the Polls Service"
Recent Activities	Chapter 50, "Integrating the Recent Activities Service"
RSS	Chapter 53, "Integrating the RSS Service"
Search	Chapter 45, "Integrating the Search Service"
Tags	Chapter 44, "Integrating the Tags Service"
Wikis	Chapter 32, "Integrating Wikis and Blogs"
Worklist	Chapter 51, "Integrating the Worklist Service"

13.3 Adding Custom Task Flows to Your Portal

Task flows, like pages, are containers in which you can add components such as portlets, content, and other task flows. You can add task flows to pages or other task flows. Task flows created in JDeveloper can be included in Resource Catalogs so that users can add them to pages or other task flows at runtime.

You can drag and drop a custom task flow into a Resource Catalog so that it is available to users to add to pages or task flows at runtime. For more information, see Section 16.2.3.7, "Dragging and Dropping a Resource into the Catalog." When you deploy the application, the task flow is also deployed to the target instance.

For detailed information about creating different types of ADF task flows, see "Creating ADF Task Flows" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.

Exposing Task Flows Created in JDeveloper to a Deployed Application

If you created a custom task flow in JDeveloper and want to expose it in an already deployed application, you must deploy the project containing the task flow as an ADF shared library to the runtime application. Once the library containing the task flow is accessible to the application, it is displayed in the runtime Resource Registry and can be added to custom Resource Catalogs from there.

Note:

Permissions to view or edit a task flow are not provisioned by default when you create the task flow. To ensure that a task flow is visible at runtime, prior to deploying as a shared library, you must grant at least the View privilege on the task flow. For more information, see Section 24.6.1, "Granting Permissions on Task Flows."

For the steps to deploy an application to a Framework application, see "Deploying the Application to a WebLogic Managed Server" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal. However, while running the Install Application Assistant, on the Choose targeting style page, select Install this deployment as a library.

For the steps to deploy an application to a WebCenter Portal: Spaces instance, see Section 56.2.3, "Rebuilding the Spaces Shared Library List."

13.4 Adding Content from Content Server to Your Portal

To provide access to the content in your Content Server content repository, you must create a connection to the Content Server. For more information, see Section 27.2.1, "How to Create a Content Repository Connection Based on the Oracle Content Server Adapter."

With a connection to Content Server established, you can use the Documents service, which includes task flows that provide a user-friendly interface to manage, display, and search documents at runtime. For more information, see Chapter 30, "Integrating the Documents Service."

Next, add one of the content task flows to your portal to expose the content from Content Server. Content task flows include Content Presenter and the Documents service task flows:

Content Presenter
Document Explorer
Document List Viewer
Document Manager
Document Navigator
Folder Viewer
Recent Documents
Document Viewer
Document Mini Properties
Document Properties
Rich Text Editor
Document Upload
Document Version History

For more information about the Content Presenter task flow, see Section 31.1, "Understanding the Content Presenter Task Flow." For more information about the Documents service task flows, see Section 31.2, "Understanding the Documents Service Task Flows."

If you use the Content Presenter task flow, you may also want to create your own Content Presenter display templates. Content Presenter display templates define how content repository items should be rendered on a page. For more information, see Chapter 29, "Creating Content Presenter Display Templates."

13.5 Adding Portlets to Your Portal

A portlet is a reusable web component that can draw content from many different sources. Portlets provide a way of presenting data from multiple sources in a meaningful and related way. For more information about portlets, see Chapter 58, "Overview of Portlets."

To add a portlet to your portal, you must first register the portlet's producer with the Framework application. For more information, see Section 64.2, "Registering Portlet Producers with a WebCenter Portal: Framework Application."

After you have registered the portlet producer, you can then simply drag and drop any portlets that you want to include in your portal onto the appropriate page. For more information, see Section 64.3, "Adding Portlets to a Page."

For information about how to create portlets, see Chapter 60, "Creating Portlets with the Portlet Wizard."

13.6 Adding Pagelets to Your Portal

A pagelet is similar to a portlet, but while portlets were designed specifically for portals, pagelets can be run on any web page, including within a portal or other web application. Pagelets can be used to expose platform-specific portlets in other web environments.

For more information about adding pagelets to your portal, see Section 63.2, "Using Pagelets in Web Applications."

13.7 Adding External Applications to Your Portal

If the resources you add to your portal require access to applications that define their own authentication processes, you can add external applications to replicate a single sign-on experience for users.

For example, your portal might include portlets that point to applications that require a separate login. Or, if your portal includes the Mail service, you must identify an external application to map the mail server user to the portal user so that the user does not have to log in separately every time.

The first time a portal user accesses the external application, he or she is prompted for a user name and password for the application. These credentials are then mapped to the portal user and stored securely in a credential store. The credential store subsequently supplies these credentials during authentication to the external application. Unless the external application's credentials change, the user supplies the credentials only once as the mapped information is read from the credential store for future requests.

For more information, see Section 69.13, "Working with External Applications."

13.8 Adding Data Controls to Your Portal

Data controls are used to retrieve information from different data sources and create user interface (UI) components within your Framework application. A data control provides you with easy-to-use methods that you can drag and drop onto JSF pages to publish content as ADF components, such as URLs, files, and folders. To add content from the data sources to JSF pages, you must first create connections to the data sources, then use the connections to create data controls based on the repositories.

You can create custom data controls to connect different data sources and add them to your application pages or task flows. For detailed information about data controls, see Oracle Fusion Middleware Fusion Developer's Guide for Oracle Application Development Framework.

Some WebCenter Portal services provide data controls for creating customized visualizations of the services. For information about consuming these data controls in your application, see Section 7.1.3, "Using WebCenter Portal Data Controls."

Exposing Data Controls for Consumption in an Already Deployed Application

The runtime Resource Registry in a Framework application or WebCenter Portal: Spaces contains a Design Time Data Controls folder by default. This folder exposes the seeded WebCenter Portal service data controls and any other data controls that were added to the application before it was deployed. To expose a new data control in an already deployed Framework application or WebCenter Portal: Spaces, you must deploy the project containing the data control as an ADF shared library to the runtime application. Once the library containing the data control is accessible to the application, it is displayed in the runtime Resource Registry and can be added to custom Resource Catalogs from there.

For the steps to deploy an application to a Framework application, see "Deploying Applications Using the WLS Administration Console" in Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle WebCenter Portal. However, while running the Install Application Assistant, on the Choose targeting style page, select Install this deployment as a library.

For the steps to deploy an application to a WebCenter Portal: Spaces instance, see Section 56.2.3, "Rebuilding the Spaces Shared Library List."