Zheng Tech Blog

In this article I reviewed the essentials of responsive web design, walked through how to design and develop a responsive WebCenter Portal application, and reviewed the essential development considerations. The article covers technical aspects of building a responsive WebCenter Portal as well as the business decision points behind each scenario. It is intended for software architects, developers, and business users who regularly work with Oracle WebCenter Portal.

Some times the IE compatibility mode is enforced to be used by your system admin at an enterprise level, especially for the intranet sites. Since Jdeveloper 11.1.1.6, a popup warning is shown to the user when ADF/WebCenter application is running on compat mode. The issues seen in compat mode is not supported by Oracle. The solution to bypass the compat mode has been documented via Oracle Doc 1555476.1. I'd like to extract the key information of the such solution here: A new feature has been introduced in JDeveloper/ADF 11.1.1.7.0 and 11.1.2.4.0 and backported to 11.1.1.6.0, 11.1.2.0.0, 11.1.2.2.0 and 11.1.2.3.0 through patch 14400317. It consists of bypassing Compatibility Mode in IE browsers. The ADF framework will force the target document to the maximum document mode supported by the browser using the X-UA-Compatible META tag. This applies to desktop browsers in compatibility view mode and also applications that use the IE WebBrowser component to host content within deskto...

Inline styles are CSS styles applied to an user interface element. Multiple properties can be applied to an element and they are separated by semi-colon. Inline styles take highest precedence. Styling rules defined by inlineStyle in ADF are added directly to the JSF page source as part of the component markup. Any styles defined in CSS style class will be overridden by the inline styles on the element. This is an advantage as well as disadvantage. Element styles can be overridden unintentionally. For re-usability and maintenance, extensive use of inline styles should be avoided. In this post I will discuss another use of inline style which is an uncommon use case in WebCenter Portal. It isn't just for CSS styles as I found in my recent practice. The inline style can set the selected state of a navigation node in WebCenter portal application. This is a very unique use case. It has to satisfy the following scenario: 1. Go link is used to implement the navigation model links. The...

I recently came across a scenario to consume the JSP file from WebCenter. It's not a usual scenario but it could be an option in the customer's environment. The customer has some JSP files stored in file system and consumed by some other Portal platform other than WebCenter. The JSP files contain conditional check in the scriptlet to display output dynamically. Now WebCenter is going to replace the old platform and options are discussed to how to consume the JSP files on the files systems. One option, of course, is to convert the JSP files into content files stored in the WebCenter Content server. This will need some additional work on the content server side to prepare the JSP file counterpart. If the logic in the JSP scriplet can be handled by content server side, then it could be an easier job. If not, multiple content files will be needed for one JSP file conversion. Let's look at the second option, which is to consume the JSP file directly from the file systems li...

I have a series of technical paper on Oracle WebCenter Spaces Performance Analysis and Tuning in Practice published at OTN: Part 1: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/enterprise2/zheng-webcenter-perf-1-1927402.html Part 2: http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/articles/enterprise2/zheng-webcenter-perf-2-1927421.html

Oracle WebCenter Spaces provides framework and resources that ready for business users to use after installation and configurations. But we all know the default look and feel of the site is really not appealing. I’ve seen prospective customers direct eyes on the WebCenter great features but step back because of the look and feel. I will have to confirm them that the site can be skinned and customized to whatever you want the site to look like. And that’s true, there are indeed great looking sites out there using sophisticated CSS and JavaScript (e.g. JQuery). Those sites are mostly designed from a HTML markup perspective and mixed with ADF components, which could make the source codes of the pages hard to read and maintain. Hard to read? Who cares, as long as it works for what the customer wants. But one of the drawbacks I’ve seen and it’s worthy to mention is it breaks the partial page rendering because of the mix of html and ADF components. Most of the pretty WebCenter public sites...

I’d like to share my own “Install Notes” on step-to-step how to build your own WebCenter Suite on a VM from scratch. If you follow my notes here, you should have your own WebCenter work station in a few hours. The install notes here are based on the Linux 64 OS which is the industry standard. Let’s begin. Software needed (can be obtained from e-delivery) a.        Oracle Linux64 bit (ver6.2 or whatever latest) b.       Oracle VirtualBox c.        Oracle DB XE11g Linux 64 d.       Oracle RCU e.       Oracle Weblogic Server 11g Linux f.         Oracle WebCenter 11g g.        Oracle UCM 11g h.       Oracle Web Tier 11g Create a new Virtual Disk a.        Install VirtualBox on your host. Start the virtualbox and crea...

Since WebCenter PS5, Oracle brings lots of standard task flows inside WebCenter Spaces. Some of them are already registered within the resource catalog and ready to use, most of them are also ready but you need to add them to the resource catalog first for business users to utilize. But from a developer standpoint, you may be interested in reviewing the source codes of the standard task flow shipped with Oracle WebCenter Spaces. Today I will show you how to locate the EAR or WAR file and take the advantages of build-in task flows. After the Oracle WebCenter Spaces is installed, go to the following directory and you will find the relevant EAR and WAR files are already installed. In my case, it’s WebCenter PS5 but it’s applicable to other 11g releases. $FMW_HOME/<WebCenter Instance Name>/webcenter/modules/oracle.webcenter.spaces_11.1.1 The one we are interested is the one at the bottom ‘oracle.webcenter.spaces.webapp.war’ file. You can ftp the...

Performance for WebCenter/ADF is always a hot topic. For every application (ADF web apps, WebCenter Portal/Spaces apps, or others), you will be ended up to deal with it sooner or later. Sooner is of course better, it's recommended to be considered at the time the project is plotted out since you will need to consider your budget for hardware/software acquisitions. I have experienced with couples of clients that requested to tune performance after the application went to production which is still OK but not the ideal time, simple because there are so many restrictions dealing with performance tuning after it went on production. The performance no doubt is a broad topic. This article will try to include a checklist of areas you need to bear in mind for the matter of performance in the WebCenter/ADF world, but will not go into very detail on each section. Performance is limited by many factors, such as hardware resource and the application architecture. The CPU type/speed,...