Using WSRP with WebLogic Portal

Best Practices for Implementing WSRP

This section describes programming and tuning practices that you should follow to ensure the best performance of your WSRP-compliant portlets, Producers, and Consumers. It contains the following guidelines:

Portlet Programming Guidelines

Please follow these guidelines when programming WSRP-compliant portlets:

Requests and Sessions

Don't rely on request attributes across portlets.
If your portlets share a session, host them on the same Producer.

Security

To secure messages, implement SSL on any port through which the Producer will be offered.
Specify true for all secure attributes in the <service-config> element of the Producer project's WEB-INF/wsrp-producer-config.xml file (for more information, please refer to Establishing WSRP Security).

Note: If you make any changes to wsrp-producer-config.xml, you will need to redeploy or bounce the server before the changes become active.

To manage user identity, rely on single-sign-on (SSO), which is set up by default in WebLogic Portal and then have users login to the Consumer portal. WebLogic Portal will manage SSO automatically. Information sharing between the Consumer and the Producer is facilitated by using an external Profile service that can run with the user identity as the key.
To secure resources on the producer, see Setting Security Constraints on Resources.

URLs

When creating URLs in a portlet, do not use direct links; instead use WebLogic Portal tags and APIs to create URLs.

Look and Feel

Let portlets use standard style attributes and specify those attributes on the Portal skins.

Backing Files

You can use backing files on the Consumer side (remote-portlet) to take some action based on session / request objects or property sets.

Caching WSRP Portlets

Producer - Use <wl:cache> or p13nCache wherever possible.
Consumer (remote-portlet) - Use 'RenderCacheable' attribute if you want to cache the remote portlet's rendered HTML. However, this is a session scoped cache and is not configurable.

Exception Handling

Producer; to prevent stack traces from appearing, errors should be handled on the Producer side and a suitable business message provided.
Consumer (remote-portlet); in WebLogic Workshop, with your remote portlet open, do the following (in this order):

Click the Document Structure tab of the remote portlet.
Click remote Content.
Click Property Editor.
Type in the Error URI

Page Flow

If using a Portal Web application as your Producer, all the portal artifacts are available in the web application; however, for any WSRP Producer that is not a portal web application, you cannot use portal features such as property sets. If you need to access portal features in your Producer, use a Portal Web application.

Development on a WebLogic Server Domain

For detailed information on using WSRP with a WebLogic Server domain, see Using WSRP in a Basic WebLogic Server Domain.

Performance Tuning Recommendations

To ensure optimal performance of your Producers and Consumers, we recommend the following performance tuning guidelines:

On the Producer side:

Enable attachment support by adding <markup transport="attachment"/> to WEB-INF/wsrp-producer-config.xml, as shown in Listing 5-1.

Listing 5-1 Enabling Attachment Support

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
wsrp-producer-config
    xmlns="http://www.bea.com/servers/weblogic/wsrp-producer-config/8.0"
    xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance"
xsi:schemaLocation="http://www.bea.com/servers/weblogic/wsrp-producer-config/8.0 
wsrp-producer-cnfig.xsd">

    <service-config>
        <registration required="false" secure="true"/>
        <service-description secure="true"/>
        <markup secure="true" rewrite-urls="true" transport="attachment"/>
        <portlet-management required="false" secure="true"/>
    </service-config>

Let the Producer create correct URLs by using Consumer-supplied URL templates. This is the default practice.

On the Consumer side

Accept the default behavior to enable caching for remote portlets.
Enable forked rendering for remote portlets.
Set connection timeout. See Setting a Timeout Value on Remote Portlets for detailed information on setting timeouts.
Disable logging
Undeploy MessageMonitor servlet from WEB-INF/web.xml.

Avoid Moving Producers

When you add producers and create remote portlets, the producer registry (WEB-INF/wsrp-producer-registry.xml) and the portal framework database tables contain specific information about the producer, such as its WSDL address and the addresses of ports described in the WSDL. If you propagate or move the producer from one environment to another, this data becomes invalid. In this case, consumers whose proxy portlets reference the producer's portlets will no longer be able to find them.

Note: Currently, WebLogic Portal only supports a shared registration model, where staging and production environments share the same producer registration handle. For more information on shared registration and propagating WSRP producers, see the Production Operation User's Guide.

Tip: You can update the database entries for a producer programmatically. The following class provides methods to get and update producer information:

com.bea.wsrp.consumer.management.producer.ProducerManager

Upgrading Simple Producers from Service Pack 3

When upgrading a simple producer from WebLogic Portal Service Pack 3 to a later service pack version, WSRP producer web application libraries are not automatically updated. If you upgrade from SP3 to a later service pack version, you must perform the following steps to ensure that your simple producer continues to function properly as a WSRP producer.

Note: A simple producer is a non-portal web application. For more information on simple producers, see Producers.

Perform the normal procedures for upgrading a WebLogic Portal application from SP3 to a later service pack version.

Copy the the following files into the WEB-INF/lib directory of your web application:

BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/netuix/web/netui-adapter.jar
BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/netuix/system/ext/web/struts-adapter.jar
BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/netuix/system/ext/web/struts-adapter-html.tld
BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/netuix/system/ext/web/struts-adapter-naming.tld
BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/netuix/system/ext/web/struts-adapter-nested.tld
BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/netuix/system/ext/web/struts-adapter-tiles.tld
BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/wsrp/wsrp-producer.jar
BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/wsrp/adapters/wsrp-jpf-adapter.jar
BEAHOME/weblogic81/portal/lib/wsrp/adapters/wsrp-struts-adapter.jar

Redeploy the WSRP producer web application.

Other Guidelines

User sessions on Consumer web applications might be lost if session cookies between Producers and Consumers overlap. To prevent this, open weblogic.xml, configure your web applications to include the domain name and web application path for session cookies. Please refer to session-descriptor in weblogic.xml Deployment Descriptor Elements at:

http://download.oracle.com/docs/cd/E13222_01/wls/docs81/webapp/weblogic_xml.html#1038173

for details on how to set the domain name and path.