Working with User Profiles

 

A user is someone who visits your Web site. Users have profiles, which consist of property sets of type "User." These property sets contain properties with default values. For example, the exampleportal property set contains a property called AcmePoints. When you created the AcmePoints property in the previous chapter, you also assigned it a default value of zero. Each user, by default, has an AcmePoints value of zero-until you change that value manually in the Administration Tools or programmatically, both of which you'll do in this tour.

Properties are the key to triggering personalized content to users when they log in. For example, the AcmePoints property provides a value that lets WebLogic track the number of visits the user makes to the Acme Web site. In this tour, the number of visits a user makes to the Acme Web site determines whether the user is an infrequent or frequent visitor, which in turn determines the content the user is shown.

This chapter describes how to manually set the number of AcmePoints for a specific user, which sets the user up for being classified later as a frequent visitor.

This topic includes the following section:

• Editing User Properties

 

---

Editing User Properties

In this section, you will change the AcmePoints for a user called "democustomer." Changing the AcmePoints for democustomer is an important preparatory step for a later part of the tutorial. The AcmePoints you set will categorize democustomer as a frequent visitor, letting you see different Web page content than what infrequent visitors see.

1. From the Administration Tools Home page, click the User Management icon. The User Management Home page appears.

2. From the User Management Home page, click the Users link (not the Create icon) in the Users banner. The Search for a User page appears.
    

   To locate a user, do one of the following:

   1. To locate the user by name, enter democustomer in the Username field, then click Search. The search returns the username democustomer and displays a link at the bottom of the page.

   2. To see a list of all users within an alphabetized category, click the appropriate letter corresponding to the first letter of the username. In this case, click "D". A list of users appear at the bottom of the page.

   3. To see a list of all users in the database, use the wildcard feature. Enter a partial username immediately followed by an asterisk (*), such as demo*. The users matching that search appear at the bottom of the page.

3. Click democustomer to edit this user. The Users: democustomer page appears.

4. From the drop-down list box, select the exampleportal property set, then click Search. The page refreshes and shows the user's values for the properties in the exampleportal property set.

   Figure 3-1 Viewing properties in a property set

   
    

5. Click Edit on the AcmePoints Properties bar. The Edit Property Values page appears.
    

6. Enter 5 in the New Value field, then click Save. The page refreshes and confirms that the property was set correctly. You have now given democustomer a non-default value for AcmePoints.

   Figure 3-2 Changing a property value from its default

   
    

7. Click Back to return to the Users: democustomer page.

8. Click Finished to save the user's property set values. The system returns to the User Management Home page.

9. Click Home on the BEA WebLogic Personalization Server banner to return to the Administration Tools Home page.