Introduction to the BEA E-Business Control Center

 

The BEA E-Business Control Center is a tool designed to simplify the tasks that are necessary to create and maintain a truly personalized Web site. Building upon the functionality of the WebLogic Portal server and the WebLogic Personalization Server products that may already support your e-business, the E-Business Control Center can make business analysts and marketing professionals in your organization more self-sufficient, thereby minimizing the need for collaboration with busy technical resources. And even when collaboration is required for more specialized or advanced tasks, this collaboration may take significantly less time and be more efficient overall.

To meet this objective, the E-Business Control Center guides users through a variety of tasks, ensuring that both business and technical staff members can focus on the aspects of e-business management that are relevant to their role in the organization. The E-Business Control Center's intuitive graphical user interface empowers people in these diverse roles, allowing them to provide exceptional value to their online customers and to effectively nurture customer relationships.

This topic is intended to introduce you to the capabilities of the E-Business Control Center and highlight some important points about its use. It provides information about the specific e-business roles and responsibilities this tool is intended to support. This topic includes the following sections:

• About the E-Business Control Center

  • About the E-Business Control Center Interface

  • What the E-Business Control Center Provides

  • Roles and Responsibilities

  • Establishing Organizational Policies

  • Recommended Reading

  • Additional Resources

• Using the E-Business Control Center

  • Starting the E-Business Control Center

  • Working with Application Data

  • Connecting to the Server

  • Modifying Connections

  • Advanced Connection Settings

  • Working with Files

  • Working with E-Business Control Center Windows

  • Synchronizing Application Data

  • Error Logs

The variable EBCC_HOME refers to your E-Business Control Center directory. By default on installation, this directory is called ebcc4.0.

Note: If you are viewing this guide in the online help system for the E-Business Control Center, only the help topics of the tools for which you are licensed are included. For the full version of this guide, go to the BEA e-docs Web site: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13218_01/wlp/docs40.

Links in the online help system that are not underlined launch a browser to jump to documents on BEA's e-docs Web site.

 

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About the E-Business Control Center

As shown in Figure 1-1, the E-Business Control Center is an e-business tool built upon the BEA products your organization's technical professionals know and trust to support their e-commerce Web development efforts. Whether your company uses WebLogic Personalization Server or WebLogic Portal, the E-Business Control Center can make expanding and maintaining your online customer relationships easier and less time consuming.

Figure 1-1 WebLogic Portal Features

 

In the Personalization-only configuration, the E-Business Control Center exists in a simplified form, while still providing you with the utilities needed to display customized content and control Webflow. The WebLogic Portal product gives you access to even more features in the E-Business Control Center, such as portal and portlet configuration, discounts, and promotional campaigns. The information provided in the following section will help you to understand what features are available in each version of the E-Business Control Center, and how these features can help you achieve your e-business goals.

The E-Business Control Center is a tool for just about everyone in the enterprise application development process, from the business analyst creating customer characteristics to the developer working with portals and Webflow. For more details about roles, see Roles and Responsibilities.

Note: For more information about WebLogic Personalization Server and WebLogic Portal, see the Strategies for Developing E-Business Web Sites at http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13218_01/wlp/docs40/strategs/index.htm.

About the E-Business Control Center Interface

Figure 1-2 shows the different parts of the E-Business Control Center.

Figure 1-2 The E-Business Control Center

 

The tools available in the E-Business Control Center appear in the Explorer window. Tools are separated by the three tabs at the bottom of the window. The Editor window appears when you open a file.

For more information on applications that are valid for deployment, see Synchronizing Application Data.

Icons that Show Status

File icons in the Explorer window can take on different appearances depending on the status of the files. Table 1-1 shows and describes the variations you might see on the standard icons.

Table 1-1 Icons that show status

Icon	Description
	File icons with a crossed-out pencil next to them are set to read-only on your file system.
	File icons with a half-filled square next to them signify files that are missing data.
	Deactivated campaign.
	Discount marked as Finalized. This discount cannot be modified to change the terms of the discount customer have already been given.
	Deactivated discount marked as Finalized.
	Pre-defined event shipped with the E-Business Control Center. These events cannot be modified, because other areas of the E-Business Control Center rely on those pre-defined events.

 

What the E-Business Control Center Provides

No matter which version of the E-Business Control Center your organization uses, the E-Business Control Center's rich feature set is sure to provide you with the tools you need to effectively personalize your e-business. This section will help you understand which E-Business Control Center features are available in your version of the product, and describes some of the E-Business Control Center features that are available in all versions of the tool to help you get started.

WebLogic Personalization Server 4.0 Customers

WebLogic Personalization Server customers can:

• Control Webflow. The Webflow tool lets you specify the order in which pages are displayed to your Web site's visitors, and it calls predefined, specialized components to execute back-end business logic.

• Track customer behavior (events). Understanding your customers is the first step to providing them with a truly personalized Web experience. The E-Business Control Center makes use of behind-the-scenes behavior tracking functionality, allowing you to leverage customers' most frequent interactions with your e-business Web site when determining how to personalize site content. Customer behaviors, or events, that are tracked range from viewing content to clicking through hyperlinks. Your technical staff can also help you add your own custom events.

• Define customer segments. Although an e-business audience may be diverse, there are often many similarities among customers that you can leverage to more effectively customize your Web site. The E-Business Control Center allows you to organize customers into groups, or customer segments, based on common characteristics. Customer segments may then be used to support your organization's strategic e-business goals.

• Create placeholders for ad display. To satisfy your customers' diverse needs, you may want to change single pieces of content on your Web sites, such as ad banners, on a regular basis. In the past, even a simple modification like changing an ad banner required the assistance of a Web developer. Now, with WebLogic Personalization Server or WebLogic Portal, you can add what is called a "placeholder" to a specific region on a Web page. In the E-Business Control Center, you add queries to a placeholder that automatically retrieve, choose, and display a single, targeted piece of content in that region of the Web page. Each time visitors view a page containing a placeholder, they may see a different piece of targeted content in the placeholder, depending on the priorities you have set on the queries and the ads. You don't need any specialized Web development knowledge to create placeholders. Placeholders also provide the important e-commerce capability of letting you capture the number of times ads are displayed by a placeholder (ad impressions) and the number of times visitors click ads displayed by a placeholder (clickthroughs).

• Target customers with personalized content. Even after you have collected some information about your customers, analyzed the data, created placeholders in your Web pages, and organized customers into segments, you may decide that frequent manual updates to your Web site content based on these factors is not enough. Content selectors in the E-Business Control Center let you dynamically match Web content to customers in real time, based on events that occur when someone visits a Web site, customer characteristics that are most often stored in user profiles, or dates and times. Once the content selectors are set up in the E-Business Control Center and your JSP developer writes the code that determines how the content will be displayed in the Web page, your Web site will automatically target customers with personalized content.

WebLogic Portal 4.0 Customers

In addition to the Personalization Server features, WebLogic Portal customers can:

• Configure Portals, Portlets, and Entitlement Segments. The portal, portlet, and entitlement segment tools let you configure your portals and determine which users have access to specific portal content. The portal tool lets you determine elements such as layout, skins, pages used in the portal, and the portlets that are part of the portal. The portlet tool lets you specify URLs to content, select Webflow, and configure other aspects of portlets. The entitlement segments tool lets you determine which users or groups see specific portal content.

• Define stand-alone discounts. As part of a marketing effort, you might want to temporarily give all your customers a discount on particular items in your product catalog. Using the E-Business Control Center, you can define stand-alone discounts by specifying the percentage or dollar amount off, whether the discount applies on a per-item, set-based, or per-order basis, the products to which the discount applies, and so on. If a customer purchases multiple items and is likely to qualify for more than one discount, the priority you associate with each discount can help resolve any conflicts and ensure that customers receive the discount(s) you intend.

• Define campaign discounts. Campaign discounts, which are available only if you use WebLogic Portal, are similar to stand-alone discounts with one exception: They are specifically designed for use within promotional campaigns. In other words, campaign discounts are discounts that are not offered to all your e-business customers, but only those who belong to a particular customer segment, who exhibit particular browsing behaviors, or meet other predefined criteria. With the E-Business Control Center, you can define campaign discounts and apply them in various ways to meet your targeted marketing objectives.

• Execute and manage promotional campaigns. Using predefined customer segments, tracked customer behaviors, and previously established campaign discounts, you can create, execute, and maintain powerful promotional campaigns with the E-Business Control Center. Display an ad in a highly visible placeholder on your home page to customers who show interest in new products, or send a promotional e-mail with a special discount to entice browsing visitors to buy. You can execute these actions based on the segment to which a customer belongs, based on the customer's behavior on your Web site, or on a number of other conditions. Alternatively, there may be times when you want to select customers at random to pilot test a new marketing strategy. With the E-Business Control Center, you can combine these campaign-specific features to meet all your promotional needs.

• Monitor and report campaign results. While your promotions are in action, use Events and Behavior Tracking to monitor and qualify promotional campaign results. After your campaign has ended, produce reports that allow you to share the success of your e-business strategies with other interested parties in your organization.

Roles and Responsibilities

The E-Business Control Center was designed specifically to help business analysts, marketing professionals, and other non-technical professionals implement customized e-business strategies that will capture and maintain sizable online audiences. Because a business analyst's strength is in conceiving effective models for e-business, the tools you use should allow you to execute these strategies easily, without worrying about technical details or becoming overly dependent on technical resources.

The E-Business Control Center does not require you to have intricate knowledge about how a Web site is implemented. Rather, the E-Business Control Center allows you to remain in control of all your e-business efforts, including the creation and modification of promotional campaigns, through an intuitive graphical interface.

Although a business analyst's reliance on technical resources is greatly reduced when using the E-Business Control Center, some degree of collaboration with your organization's technical staff may still be necessary to fully personalize your customers' experience. The E-Business Control Center provides many out-of-the-box components that you can use to meet your business objectives. However, you may develop a new e-business strategy that leverages the power of BEA technology but does not surface in the E-Business Control Center tool. It is during these times that you may need to work with a technical resource in your organization to establish a supporting infrastructure. Once this is done, however, you can reuse the new components like you would any other in the E-Business Control Center.

Business Analysts will most likely collaborate with more technical resources who may:

• Manage the operations of major pieces of the Web site, or the entire site itself.

• Coordinate major and minor change processes.

• Be an active participant in overall business effectiveness monitoring and system performance monitoring.

• Be responsible for major, structural updates to an e-business Web site, for management of user profiles, user permissions, and so on.

• Perform many behind-the-scenes programming tasks that keep a Web site functioning.

Therefore, when you require additional support for the E-Business Control Center, you would typically contact a person (or a group of people) who fill the business engineer role described previously.

For more detailed information about how a business engineer accomplishes campaign-related programming tasks, see the Guide to Developing Campaign Infrastructure.

Establishing Organizational Policies

Much of the data in the E-Business Control Center is stored in XML files and modified on individual client systems. When synchronized to your server, that data determines the rules and behavior of your enterprise application.

Warning: When multiple developers work concurrently on a single set of source files and business documents, they can overwrite each others' work or create sets of changes that are incompatible and difficult to debug when they synchronize their data to the WebLogic Portal server.

We highly recommend using content management or version control software to control user access to files and provide a file revision history. Also, since such software usually stores data on a single server, your system administrator can back up that data. There are many issues involved with authoring and deploying your enterprise application to go live. To help save you time, effort, and money, and to help prevent you from making mistakes that negatively affect your Web presence, read about these issues in the Deployment Guide.

To facilitate concurrent development, we recommend the following model:

• Use a content management or source-control system to synchronize the separate development environments, control access to files, and maintain a history of changes.

• Organize your development tasks into discrete units. For example, one task is creating a promotional campaign and another is modifying the flow of data through the Web site (Webflow).

• Use a separate installation of the E-Business Control Center for each development task.

• For each installation of the E-Business Control Center, deploy an instance of your enterprise application under a unique name.

It is extremely important that your organization develop some policies about who owns objects like customer segments, placeholders, events, campaigns, and so on. Ownership of objects is critical when it comes to modifying information that may be in broad use. For example, if a customer segment is created by one user, it is very possible that other users may begin to use the segment (perhaps unbeknownst to the original author). If the author later changes the segment definition, many people are going to be affected. So, it is also highly recommended that your organizational policies identify which objects others can use, which are more proprietary or "use at your own risk," and so on.

Recommended Reading

After you have reviewed this introduction, you can take a number of paths through the documentation, depending upon your goals.

WebLogic Portal 4.0 Customers

If you are a WebLogic Portal customer, review the conceptual explanations in all chapters of this guide. If you are going to develop campaigns, pay particular attention to the "Roadmap for Creating Promotional Campaigns" before getting started. This topic should contain all the information you need to know before moving on to the step-by-step instructions that will guide you through campaign implementation.

Note: The importance of planning can never be overstated, so resist skipping the Roadmap discussion! Carefully thinking about and designing a detailed marketing strategy ensures that you have (at the very minimum) the information you will need to begin implementing your campaigns in the E-Business Control Center. In addition, up-front planning can help you identify areas where your strategy may be unclear, possibly preventing you from running into problems down the road that require both time and effort to resolve. Naturally, such problems can delay the release of a promotional campaign, thus affecting your ability to provide the valuable services your online customers expect.

WebLogic Personalization Server 4.0 Customers

If you have the Personalization-only version of the E-Business Control Center, you should review at least the conceptual explanations in the following chapters:

• "Creating and Managing Property Sets"

• "Using Customer Segments to Target High-Value Markets"

• "Retrieving Documents with Content Selectors"

• "Displaying Ads"

• "Webflow Components and Concepts"

• "Using the Webflow and Pipeline Editors"

Additional Resources

In addition to this guide, the following resources will also help you understand and use the E-Business Control Center.

BEA E-Marketing Fieldbook

The goal of the BEA E-Marketing Fieldbook is to help you architect a strategy for e-business success. This document weaves together a breadth of fundamental e-business best practices with practical recommendations for how to implement your BEA customer management platform and other technologies to achieve maximum value from your customer relationships.

The Fieldbook contains content ranging from Marketing 101 concepts to leading-edge, technology driven marketing strategies. By covering a range of topics, the Fieldbook addresses the diverse needs of organizations with varied levels of marketing sophistication, while also conveying the importance of building e-business success through a solid foundation of marketing basics.

Fieldbook topics center around traditional functional marketing roles to enable individual contributors within your organization to quickly find the content that applies to their responsibilities. Although written for marketers and business managers, the Fieldbook still covers an array of technical issues, focusing on utilization of technology to drive business objectives.

The BEA E-Marketing Fieldbook is available on the BEA e-docs product documentation Web site: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13218_01/wlp/docs40/interm/pdf.htm.

Sample Applications and Product Tours

To help you understand the interactions taking place between the E-Business Control Center tool and your Web site or Portal, the documentation also contains two tours that walk you through the features highlighted in the sample applications:

• The Personalization Examples demonstrate the personalization services provided by the WebLogic Personalization Server.

• The JSP Commerce and Campaign Tour leads you through many of the Web pages provided as part of the sample storefront application, demonstrating how these templates work and illustrating the scope of campaign-related features that are available.

For more information about these product tours, see the BEA e-docs product documentation Web site: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13218_01/wlp/docs40/index.html.

Online Help

At any time, you can access the E-Business Control Center's built-in online help system to select from a list of available topics or to search for a particular topic. The help system contains both step-by-step directions and specific recommendations about how to get the most out of the E-Business Control Center's capabilities for your e-business efforts.

The contents of this help system are also provided on the BEA e-docs product documentation Web site: http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13218_01/wlp/docs40 (in both HTML and PDF formats), and is updated as new information is added or corrections are made.

 

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Using the E-Business Control Center

This section provides an overview of the E-Business Control Center and shows you how to perform tasks that are common to all tools in the E-Business Control Center.

Note: While the E-Business Control Center may run successfully at lower monitor resolutions, we recommend a monitor resolution setting of 1024 by 768.

Starting the E-Business Control Center

If you feel comfortable with the materials previously described, you are ready to use the E-Business Control Center. To start the E-Business Control Center:

Windows: Selecting Start ->Programs ->BEA WebLogic E-Business Platform -> BEA E-Business Control Center 4.0 -> E-Business Control Center.

For a full view of the E-Business Control Center, see Figure 1-2.

If you don't see the Explorer window along the left side of the E-Business Control Center, click the Open Explorer button in the main toolbar, as shown in Figure 1-3.

Figure 1-3 Opening the Explorer Window

 

Working with Application Data

The E-Business Control Center lets you develop the data that controls the behavior of your enterprise applications. In the E-Business Control Center, data files for an enterprise application are stored in a specific directory structure. This structure, for example, contains directories for storing the Segments, Placeholders, Webflow, and so on, that an enterprise application will use when the data is synchronized to the server.

There are many issues involved in creating and maintaining application data, especially if multiple developers will work on a single application, or the data files will be stored in a content management or version control system (which we recommend). For more information about the issues involved with maintaining application data, see Establishing Organizational Policies and the Deployment Guide.

The following sections provide tasks for and information about working with application data in the E-Business Control Center.

Creating an Application Structure for E-Business Control Center Data

The data files in the E-Business Control Center must reside in a specific directory structure. This procedure shows you how to create that structure for an application in the E-Business Control Center.

If you want to view an existing application before creating a new one, you can open the sample application that comes with the E-Business Control Center. See Opening Application Data.

To create an application structure for E-Business Control Center data:

1. Choose File -> New Application in the menu.

2. In the New Application window, select the folder under which you want to create the application structure.

   For example, to make the application a subfolder of the EBCC_HOME\applications folder, select the EBCC_HOME\applications folder.

   You can create the application structure anywhere you like.

3. In the New Directory field at the bottom of the window, enter the name of the application.

   Note: Even though the application structure supports a specific enterprise application, you can name the E-Business Control Center application directory whatever you like. This directory name simply serves as a container for the structured subfolders that are automatically created in this procedure. The way the data in this application structure is ultimately sent to its enterprise application is determined by the connection settings to the server. See Connecting to the Server.

4. Click Create.

The application structure is built automatically, and you can begin using the E-Business Control Center to configure the enterprise application.

Note: When you create a new application structure, a default webflow-extensions.wfx file is placed in the application's default\webflow subfolder. This file contains the default Webflow extensions that will be used for any Web application you add to the application's structure (see Creating a Web Application Folder for an Enterprise Application).

If you customize the webflow-extensions.wfx file in the default\webflow subfolder, any Web application folder you add afterwards will contain the customized Webflow extensions.

Opening Application Data

To begin using the E-Business Control Center, you must open application data. When you open application data, all of that application's data is loaded into the E-Business Control Center, where you can modify, add to, remove, or synchronize that data.

Note: The E-Business Control Center is installed with the following sample applications, located in the EBCC_HOME\applications folder: p13nApp, petflowApp, portal, and wlcsApp. Each contains different types of data.

To open an application:

1. If you are using a content management or version control system, check out the files for the application you want to open.

2. In the menu, choose File -> Open Application.

3. In the Open Application window, locate and single-click the application folder.

   For example, to open the wlcsApp sample application, single-click the EBCC_HOME\applications\wlcsApp folder.

4. Click Open.

   Data for the application is loaded into the E-Business Control Center.

When an application is loaded, you can select a tool icon in the Explorer window and see its files, as shown in Figure 1-4.

Figure 1-4 With an application open, click a tool icon to see its files

 

Each time you launch the E-Business Control Center, the last application you had open is loaded automatically.

Directory Structure of an Application

A valid application—one you can open in the E-Business Control Center—has a specific directory structure with specific directory names, as shown in Figure 1-5.

Figure 1-5 Directory structure for a valid application

 

You can name the application (wlcsApp in this example), the webapps (tools, and wlcs in this example), and the subfolders of layouts and skins whatever you like (subject to standard naming restrictions). The directory structure and the rest of the directory names must match Figure 1-5 for you to be able to open the application in the E-Business Control Center.

The default\webflow folder contains a file called webflow-extensions.wfx that you can use to customize your default extensions for Webflow. For more information, see Creating a Web Application Folder for an Enterprise Application.

To ensure that you create the correct directory structure for an application, see Creating an Application Structure for E-Business Control Center Data.

About the Sample Applications

The sample applications that come with the E-Business Control Center, located in the EBCC_HOME\applications folder, contain files for each tool in the E-Business Control Center. You can open these files to get a better idea of how each tool works. See Opening Files for more information.

Detailed information for working with each of the tools in the E-Business Control Center is contained throughout this guide.

Creating a Web Application Folder for an Enterprise Application

The Webflows/Pipelines tool in the E-Business Control Center is associated with specific Web applications within an enterprise application. Use this procedure to add a Web application directory to the structure of the enterprise application in the E-Business Control Center.

1. In the E-Business Control Center, open the application to which you want to add the Web application folder.

2. Choose File -> New -> Web Application in the menu.

3. In the New Web Application window, enter the exact name of a Web application that will either exist or that already exists on the server.

4. Click OK. The Web application folder is added as a subfolder of the webapps folder in the application directory structure (see Figure 1-5).

   The webflow-extensions.wfx file in the application's default\webflow subfolder is also copied to the new Web application folder.

Creating a Web Application Folder for Portal

For information on creating a Web application folder for Portal, see "Introducing WebLogic Portal" in the Getting Started with Portals and Portlets.

Connecting to the Server

Although the majority of E-Business Control Center functionality does not require users to log in to a running WebLogic Portal server, some areas of the E-Business Control Center require you to log in to the server to view or use certain data. You must log in to the server to:

• Search for or preview ads in various windows

• Access property sets in various windows

• Use the Catalog Browser in various windows to select items in a catalog

• Select and preview e-mail content that will be sent out automatically as part of a promotional campaign

• Synchronize your application data to the server

The connection settings determine which enterprise application on the server the E-Business Control Center will be synchronized to. The E-Business Control Center Connection Settings tool makes it easy to set the necessary connections to the WebLogic Portal server. You only need to know a few pieces of information to set up connections: the name of your enterprise application, the name of the server running WebLogic Portal server, the port number, and the username and password. You can get this information from your system administrator.

If your organization uses more than one server—for purposes of backup or failover, or to store different types of data on different servers—you can set up a connection for each server.

Connections you set up are available for all applications you open in the E-Business Control Center.

To set up connections to the server:

When you first access a feature in the E-Business Control Center that requires a server connection, the Connection Setup window appears (Figure 1-6). (If you choose Tools -> Synchronize, the window is called Synchronization Setup.)

Figure 1-6 The Connection Setup Window

 

To create a server connection to access the data:

1. In the Display Name field, type a new connection name.

2. In the Application Name field, enter the exact name of your enterprise application. The name is case sensitive. This is the enterprise application to which you will synchronize your E-Business Control Center data.

   You can get the application name from your system administrator. Your system administrator can also provide your enterprise application name(s) in the Application Name drop-down list, and set a default application name to appear in that field automatically. See Adding Application Names to the Application Name Drop-Down List.

   You can also select one of the sample application names from the drop-down list if you are working with and synchronizing to one of the sample applications.

3. In the Server field, enter http://<servername>:<port>, where <servername> is the name of the server that WebLogic Portal is running on, and the <port> is the server's port number, such as 7501.

   You can get this information from your system administrator.

4. Enter your username and password.

   The default username is system, and the default password is the password that was set during WebLogic Server installation. The username and password are set up and maintained in the Administration Tools. Users assigned to the Administrators group can use their own username and password. You only need to enter your username and password once per session.

5. Click Connect.

   You are given access to the server-side data you are requesting, and the connection is added to the Connection Settings, described in Modifying Connections, where you can edit, delete, or select it for accessing data on the server.

When you create a connection to server-side data for the first time, the connection you establish is used for all data on the server listed at the beginning of this procedure. You will therefore be given automatic access to all other types of server-side data based on that connection.

If you want to use different connections for different types of data—for example, if you store campaign e-mail and ad content on a different server than other data, you can add connections with the Connection Settings tool and individually assign those connections to different types of server-side data. For more information, see Modifying Connections.

Modifying Connections

After you have established connections in the Connection Setup window when you access server-side data in the E-Business Control Center, you can modify those settings with the Connection Settings tool.

To modify existing connections:

1. In the E-Business Control Center, choose Tools -> Connection Settings.

2. In the Connection Settings window, shown in Figure 1-7, click the Connections tab.

   Figure 1-7 Setting Connections to the Server

   
    

3. Select the connection you want to modify, and click Edit. If you want to create a new connection, click New.

4. In the Connection Details window (Figure 1-8), enter a name for the connection in the Display Name field.

   Figure 1-8 Connection Details Window

   
    

5. In the Application Name field, enter the exact name of your enterprise application. The name is case sensitive. This is the enterprise application to which you will synchronize your E-Business Control Center data.

   You can get the application name from your system administrator. Your system administrator can also provide your enterprise application name(s) in the Application Name drop-down list, and set a default application name to appear in that field automatically. See Adding Application Names to the Application Name Drop-Down List.

   You can also select one of the sample application names from the drop-down list if you are working with and synchronizing to one of the sample applications.

6. In the Server field, enter http://<servername>:<port>, where <servername> is the name of the server that WebLogic Portal is running on, and the <port> is the server's port number, such as 7501.

   You can get this information from your system administrator.

7. You should not have to click the Advanced button to modify the Uniform Resource Identifier (URI) paths to the server. Your system administrator should notify you if you ever need to modify these settings.

   Note: For convenience, the name you enter/select in the Application Name field is automatically put at the beginning of each URI in the Advanced section of the window.

8. Click OK. The Connection Details window closes.

9. Create any remaining connections you need. Each connection can point to a different application, server, and port.

10. When you are finished creating connection, click the Associations tab in the Connection Settings window.

11. The connection selected in the All-Purpose Connection drop-down list is the single connection you will use to access the relevant data on the server from the E-Business Control Center (the types of data listed at the beginning of this procedure).

    If you want to use different connections for different types of data, select the "Use independent connections for each task" option, and for each type of data listed in the window, select the appropriate connection.

    For example, if your organization stores ad content and e-mail content on a separate server or port from the main development server or main port, you could select that connection in the Content Preview and E-mail Content fields, and select the development connection for the remaining fields.

12. Click OK.

After you set up your connections, you are prompted for your username and password. You only need to enter your username and password once per session.

The default username is system, and the default password is the password that was set during WebLogic Server installation. The username and password are set up and maintained in the Administration Tools. Users assigned to the Administrators group can use their own username and password.

If for some reason you are ever presented with the Connection Setup window again, select an existing connection from the Display Name field, enter your username and password if necessary, and click Connect.

Advanced Connection Settings

The following sections provide instructions for system administrators to help make the connection-setting process easier and more error-free for E-Business Control Center users.

Changing the Default Connection Setting URIs

When users set up connection settings to access server-side data and to synchronize E-Business Control Center data to the server, they use the Connection Settings and Connection Details windows, shown in Figure 1-7 and Figure 1-8.

In the Connection Details window, there is an Advanced button that displays the URIs to the enterprise application selected in the Application Name field, as shown in Figure 1-9.

Figure 1-9 Connection URIs

 

If your organization has modified the default locations of the server-side data, your system administrator can modify the URIs that automatically appear in the Connection Details window so that users do not have to modify these settings. To change the default URIs, follow this procedure.

1. Make a backup of the config.xml file, located in the EBCC_HOME\bin directory, in case you need to revert to the original after you modify it.

2. Open the config.xml file.

3. There are five services you can override. The names of these services appear as attributes in the <connection> element.

   The services are: adsearch, catalogbrowser, datasync, emailcontent, and propertyset.

4. To override any of these default settings, add them as attributes to the <DefaultSupportServiceURIs/> element.

   For example, to override the adsearch service so that the E-Business Control Center points to ad data for a summer campaign, modify the <DefaultSupportServiceURIs/> element so it looks like this:

   <DefaultSupportServiceURIs
    adsearch="CampaignTool/SummerCampaignWS" />

   Note: The new URI you create is always automatically prepended by the name of the application selected in the Application Name field. For example, using the previous example change (adsearch="CampaignTool/SummerCampaignWS"), if a user has selected portal in the Application Name field of the Connection Details window, the following URI will be displayed in Ad Search field in the Advanced section of the Connection details window:
   
   /portalCampaignTool/SummerCampaignWS

5. Save and close the config.xml file.

   If you do not close the file, users will not be able to access the updated URIs.

6. Tell your E-Business Control Center users to restart the E-Business Control Center edit each connection by clicking the Restore Defaults button in the Advanced section of the Connection Details window (Figure 1-9).

To remove your URI overrides, remove any or all of the attributes you added to the <DefaultSupportServiceURIs/> element, and have your users modify their connection settings by clicking the Restore Defaults button in the Advanced section of the Connection Details window.

Adding Application Names to the Application Name Drop-Down List

When E-Business Control Center users set up connections to the WebLogic Portal server, as described in Connecting to the Server, there is an Application Name field in which they enter the name of the enterprise application they are working with.

The system administrator can add application names to the Application Name drop-down list so that users can select them rather than typing them. This functionality eliminates two potential problems: it eliminates typing mistakes that result in server connection failures (because the name, which is case-sensitive, must exactly match the name of the enterprise application); and it eliminates support calls that the system administrator must field when typing mistakes cause server connection failures.

Figure 1-10 shows the Application Name drop-down list to which the system administrator can add application names.

Figure 1-10 Application Name Drop-Down List

 

To add application names to the Application Name drop-down list:

1. Make a backup of the config.xml file, located in the EBCC_HOME\bin directory, in case you need to revert to the original after you modify it.

2. Open the config.xml file.

3. Within the <EnterpriseApps> element, add an <application> element that contains a name attribute whose value is the application name you want to appear in the drop-down list. You can also make an application name the default name that appears in the drop-down list by adding the attribute and value default="true".

   The following example shows how you would add an enterprise application called "gromit" to the drop-down list and make it the default name.

   <EnterpriseApps>

       <application name="gromit" default="true"/>

   </EnterpriseApps>

4. Save and close the config.xml file.

   If you do not close the file, users will not be able to see the new application in the drop-down list.

5. Have users restart the E-Business Control Center to see the new application name in the drop-down list.

Working with Files

When you are working with tools in the E-Business Control Center (Portals, Campaigns, Placeholders, Webflows/Pipelines, and so on), all of your work is stored in XML files. When you have created all your E-Business Control Center files, you must synchronize those files to the WebLogic Portal server for those files to affect your enterprise application.

Files are stored in the application structure illustrated in Figure 1-5.

It is important to use a content management or version control system to store and maintain your E-Business Control Center data files, and it is important to have organizational policies for maintaining and synchronizing data. For more information, see Establishing Organizational Policies.

The following procedures show you how to create and maintain E-Business Control Center files.

Creating Files (Other than Webflow/Pipeline)

Use this procedure to create E-Business Control Center files of any type other than Webflow/Pipeline files. For instructions on creating Webflow/Pipeline files, see Creating Webflow/Pipeline Files.

1. In the Explorer window, select the tab containing the tool for which you want to create a new file.

2. In the Explorer toolbar, click the New button, and select the type of file you want to create.

   If you are creating a Portal, select a Web application in the Select Web Application dialog box, and click OK.

   The new files opens in an Editor window.

3. Edit the file.

   The remainder of this guide contains details for working with each type of file.

4. Click the Save button in the main toolbar.

5. In the Save As window, name the file and click Save.

   The length of the filename can be between 1 and 64 characters. The name must start with either a letter or an underscore character (_). The only characters allowed in the rest of the name are letters, numbers, underscores, periods, and hyphens.

If you receive an error trying to save a file, make sure the file name contains valid characters, and make sure your directory structure is correct, as described in Directory Structure of an Application.

Creating a File by Duplicating an Existing File

To save editing steps required to create a file, you can create a file by duplicating an existing file. To do this:

1. Open the file you want to duplicate.

2. Choose File -> Save As in the menu.

3. In the Save As window, enter the name of the new file, and click Save.

Creating Webflow/Pipeline Files

Use this procedure to create Webflow/Pipeline files in the E-Business Control Center. To create all other types of files in the E-Business Control Center, see Creating Files (Other than Webflow/Pipeline).

1. In the Explorer window, select the Site Infrastructure tab, and click the Webflows/Pipelines icon.

2. In the Explorer toolbar, click the New button, and select Webflow/Pipeline.

3. In the dialog box that appears (see Figure 1-11), select the New Webflow option to create a new Webflow namespace or the New Pipeline option to create a new Pipeline.

   1. If you select the New Webflow option, select the Web application to which you want to add a Webflow namespace, and enter a name for that namespace in the Namespace field.

   2. If you select the New Pipeline option, select an existing namespace in the Namespace field, or type the name of a new namespace; then enter the name for the new Pipeline in the Pipeline Name field.

      The length of the filename can be between 1 and 64 characters. The name must start with either a letter or an underscore character (_). The only characters allowed in the rest of the name are letters, numbers, underscores, periods, and hyphens.

4. Click OK. The new item is added to the tree in the Explorer window, as shown in Figure 1-11, and an Editor window opens with the new file.

   Figure 1-11 Where New Webflow Namespace and Pipeline Files Appear in the Explorer Window

   
    

Note: You must add a new Web application to the E-Business Control Center for the Web application to appear in the Webflows/Pipelines Explorer window tree. See Creating a Web Application Folder for an Enterprise Application.

For more information on Webflows and Pipelines, see "Webflow Components and Concepts" and "Using the Webflow Editor."

Opening Files

To open a file, select the tool it belongs to in the Explorer window, and double-click the file in the list of files. The file opens in the Editor window.

Saving Files

After you have created or modified a file, with that file active in the Editor window, click the Save button in the main toolbar. If you are saving a newly created file, enter the name of the file in the Save As dialog box, and click OK.

If you close the file or the Editor window before saving changes you have made, you are prompted to save your changes.

Note: If you receive an error trying to save a file, make sure the file name contains valid characters, and make sure your directory structure is correct, as described in Directory Structure of an Application.

Deleting Files

To delete a file, select it in the Explorer window and click the Delete button in the Explorer toolbar.

Renaming Files

You can rename a file by opening it, choosing File -> Save As in the menu, and saving the file with the new name you want. If you no longer want the old file, delete it.

Filtering Files

You can filter the list of files in the Explorer window to show files with specific name characteristics.

1. Select a tool icon to list its files.

2. In the Filter field, enter a portion of a name that represents the names you want to view, and click the Filter button, as shown in Figure 1-12.

   For example, if you want to list all files starting with the letter "R," enter R in the filter field and press the Filter button. If you want to view campaigns that contain "tour" in the name, enter tour in the Filter field.

3. To view the full list again, click the Show All Objects button next to the Filter button.

   Figure 1-12 Filtering files

   
    

Working with E-Business Control Center Windows

This section provides tips for manipulating the windows in the E-Business Control Center.

Tips for Closing Windows and Tabs

Here are a few tips for closing windows and tabs in the E-Business Control Center:

• In the Editor window, clicking the close button in the upper right corner closes the entire window, not just the file you are currently viewing. You are prompted to save open files that have changed.

• To close an individual file, right-click its tab in the Editor window and choose Close.

• When you choose File -> Close in the menu, the active tab of the active window closes. For example, if the Editor window is active, the active file closes.

• If you inadvertently close an Explorer window tab, restore the Explorer window by clicking the Open Explorer icon in the main toolbar.

Organizing Tabs

You can move Explorer or Editor tabs among different windows by using the docking feature. Here is an illustration of one of the more practical uses of this feature: If you had four files (tabs) open in the Editor, and two files were related (a discount and the campaign that uses the discount, for example), you could dock the discount and campaign files into a separate window to better organize your workspace.

To dock a tab to another window:

1. Right-click the tab you want to dock into another window.

2. Choose Dock View Into, then select the type of window you want to dock the tab into.

If a file is the only open file in a window, it will not have a tab, and you cannot dock it into another window. A window must contain more than one file to display tabs.

Note: To restore the Explorer window to its default state of three tabs, click the Open Explorer button on the main toolbar.

Minimizing Windows

When you minimize an Editor window, it becomes an icon at the bottom of the E-Business Control Center window. To restore the Editor to full size, click the icon.

Synchronizing Application Data

Synchronizing application involves using the Tools -> Synchronize option to move the application data files from your local system to your enterprise application server.

Warning: If you and other developers concurrently synchronize data to a single enterprise application, it is possible to overwrite each others' work or create sets of changes that are incompatible and difficult to debug. To prevent this possibility, synchronize to separate instances of your application. For more information on how to set up your development environment, see "Milestone 4: Set Up a Development Site" in the Strategies for Developing E-Business Web Sites documentation.

To synchronize, you must be connected to the server. See Connecting to the Server. Before you synchronize, you can also validate your E-Business Control Center data prior to synchronization to see if any files are incomplete (Tools -> Validate Application). For procedures and information on validating and synchronizing data, see "Synchronizing Application Data" in the Deployment Guide.

Note: If files are open in the E-Business Control Center Editor window with unsaved changes when you synchronize, those unsaved changes are not synchronized. Changes must be saved to be synchronized.

Error Logs

To find out more—albeit cryptic—details about any errors you may have received using the E-Business Control Center, you can open two different error logs:

• EBCC_HOME\system\ide.log - shows information and errors related to the NetBeans integrated development environment (IDE)

• EBCC_HOME\tools.log - shows E-Business Control Center error messages

You may also be asked to provide these files for any customer support calls you make.

If you do not see the tools.log file in the EBCC_HOME directory, that probably means there have been no errors to generate the file.

Warning: The tools.log file only stores errors for the current session. If you start the E-Business Control Center, and you have errors in the tools.log file from the previous session, the next error you receive in the current session will wipe out those previous errors. If you want to save error messages for a session, copy and rename the tools.log file so you can access it later.