Understanding the Portal Registry

The portal registry is a tree structure in which content for a portal is organized, classified, and registered. The portal registry classes (API) are used to update the portal registry. The Portal Administration pages provide a GUI access to the portal registry API. You can also access them using a PeopleCode program you write yourself. How you access the portal registry depends on the type of updates required. Your organization will likely use both methods of updating the portal registry. This topic focuses on accessing the portal registry classes using PeopleCode.

A portal is a website that helps you navigate to other web-based applications and content. The PeopleSoft Portal is a business portal. It is similar to general purpose portals, except that its main purpose is to help end-users be more effective in accessing information to perform their jobs.

Each PeopleSoft Portal is defined by one PeopleSoft portal registry. The PeopleSoft portal registry consists of a number of system tables and associated data in a PeopleSoft database. The portal registry must reside within one PeopleSoft database. There can be more than one portal registry in a PeopleSoft database, but only one portal registry is associated with a PeopleSoft Portal.

The portal registry consists of the following primary parts:

• Folders

• Content references

• Nodes

Folders and content references make up the majority of the portal registry, and provide a hierarchical tree structure to describe various content that is registered as part of a PeopleSoft portal.

Nodes provide a logical name to a specific webserver and database, so content can be registered independent of specific webservers. It is used when the portal servlet attempts to retrieve content—both internal PeopleSoft content as well as external content—and to assemble pages.

The primary function of the portal is to take a target URL (generally a URL for a PeopleSoft component) that comes in from a user's browser, and assemble a page with that content and any other content. The layout and what content to assemble on the page is defined by the node template, which is composed of HTML. The portal attempts to find the content reference associated (that is, registered) with the target URL to get the template, or uses a series of default templates if it cannot get the template from a content reference.