Zheng Tech Blog

Short after my presentation on Responsive WebCenter Porta l @ Collaborate 14 in Vegas, I had a video interview with Bob Rhubart who runs Oracle ArchBeat - the official blog of the OTN Architect Community. In this 10 min talk, I had reviewed my presentation topic, the hot gossips in the hallway and the visions of hot topics in the next coming collaborate.

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.

Let’s collaborate at Collaborate14 ! Location : Las Vegas, NV – Venetian & Sands Expo Center Dates : April 7 th – April 11 th Build Your Responsive & Mobilized Enterprise Portal , by JayJay Zheng Date: 04/10/2014 Time: 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM Location: Level 3, San Polo 3502 Abstract: Mobilizing emerges as a "must-have" feature for modern web experience. Oracle WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.8 introduces multi-channel portal experience to support mobilized web for smart devices. This session reveals the essential secret sauce of the new mobilizing support – responsive web design, and teaches how to extend the responsive template to support your custom needs. The session helps to determine your mobile enterprise portal strategy and teaches how to build the responsive from scratch to create your own mobilized enterprise portal on WebCenter Portal Framework applications. Further, the session analyzes real world customer cases to help you avoid the pitfalls a...

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...

Thanks Martin Deh from A-Team for identifying it is a recently reported bug. To summarize the problem: during a load testing (>1000 users attempt) on a WebCenter framework application developed with content presenter task flows, the performance (page response time) was greatly impacted by a series of parked threads. The issue was not produced in the 1000 users test. The parked threads took from >30 seconds to minutes to resume. By investigating the stack trace, the culprit is pointed to java.util.concurrent.locks.ReentrantLock.lock() which is called by UCMBridge.getAccessLevel(IdcContext, DataObject, ITrace). This issue has been filed as a bug ( Bug 17330713 ) and the patch/fix is to be provided soon (Update: the patch is available as of date 11/4/2013 for 11.1.1.7.1) The following shows a graphic indication of the parked threads (gray) through the tests. As you can see, the gray areas took the majority of the timeline. Here is the stack track of one particular parked ...

Performance is a broad topic which is never out of date. I'd like to itemize a checklist with specific topics, links and references. Some topic may be more generic and some may be more specific. But this list mainly focuses on WebCenter Portal applications and its relevant products. This is not intended to be a complete list and there will never be. WebCenter Performance Tuning Guide HA for WebCenter Portal and ADF application Configure JOC for WebCenter Portal services Configure Coherence Caching for Content Presenting WebCenter Performance Study (Including Enable Client Caching and Compression) Tuning JVM Weblogic Capacity Planning Middleware Performance Tuning Roadmap Oracle HTTP Server Performance Tuning MDS Performance Tuning Using Cluster and HA Features Some Useful A-Team Blog Posts: High availability considerations for WebCenter Portal and ADF   Improving ADF Page Rendering Time : Progressively Loading Taskflows Configure Coherence for Oracl...

My previous post described a scenario that the OAM DCC programmatic authentication is not supported yet, and here I am presenting a nice alternative to do the DCC authentication non-programmatically. You may have a read on Frank's book "Oracle Fusion Developer Guide" and there is a section in the ADF security talking about "Creating a login form in JSF" programmatically. This approach works for JEE contained security but would not work well with your WebCenter Portal or ADF app integrated with OAM authentication. I am introducing an approach that does not require any programmatic authentication and can be used safely with any type of authentications (contained security or OAM authentication). Note: You can create HTML form in JSF but there are many limitations, such as only one form component can be allowed in a page. Due to this, it's impossible to support a complicated login page in JSF. It induced extra pitfalls and challenges on the skinning as we...

In case of OAM authentication failures, the OAM server will send the error codes back to the client. It's up to the client to decide what actual error message needs to be displayed on different types of authentication failures. For the list of the standard error codes, you can refer to here . To getting the error code on the client side, they are different based on whether it's ECC or DCC authentication. I have not found this difference documented in anywhere yet. So I am putting it in this blog post. DCC (Detached Credential Collector) is introduced in OAM 11gR2. ECC is embedded credential collector. My previous post has described its concept and advantages, so I will not repeat it here. For ECC, the link above also shows a code snippet to get the error code parameter "p_error_code". The error code is returned back as one of the request parameters on the browser URL. So it can be accessed by calling request.getParameter("p_error_code"). <%@page i...

Credential Collection is the process of collecting the end user's credentials through a login page. When OAM Webgate intercepts a requests and detects the user is not authenticated yet, it would redirect the user to the login page. In OAM, when the login page is hosted on the OAM server, it's called Embedded Credential Collector (ECC). Another form - Detached Credential Collector (DCC) - is introduced in OAM 11gR2. As the name explains, DCC can be decoupled from the OAM server, which provides the flexibility of deploying the login page in either trusted internal network or DMZ. It uses a specific WebGate to collect he user credential and communicate to the OAM using secure Oracle Access Protocol (OAP). It offers a solution that isolates the OAM serve from any unauthenticated network connection, such as public access. It is my interest to discuss on whether DCC supports programmatic authentication. Usually the login page for OAM authentication would be form based JSP page w...

You might experience the FileNotFoundException (OracleJSP error:java.io.FileNotFoundException) error on rending your JEE app after a recent deployment on WebLogic server. You could also see errors in the log stating "unable to dispatch JSP page". First thing to try is, clear your browser's cache and request the page again. If this is not helping, then the issue is from the server side. When web application is activated and deployed, the new web application is exploded to a tmp directory under $DOMAIN_HOME, eg. $DOMAIN_HOME/servers/AdminServer/tmp/_WL_user... These directories are used in subsequent server starts so the applications do not have to be deployed again. In this case, some of the files and directories are missing in the tmp directory, resulting in errors observed. It is unknown what caused the files/directories to be missing in this case. To get rid of the error, simply need to either restart the manager server or force the re-deployment like below: ...

Mobilizing Your Portal Strategy [CON8944] Nediljko Bilkic - IT Manager, Ross Stores, Inc. JayJay Zheng - Solution Architect, Aurionpro Solutions, Inc. Ashish Agrawal - Sr. Director, Product Management, Oracle Mobile portals must deliver much of the same capability available to desktop users and also provide unique capabilities pertinent to users on the move, all in a form that leverages mobile device capabilities and context signals. Although mobility raises new challenges for portal initiatives, it also brings a world of new opportunities to improve user engagement and business value. Attend this session to learn how Oracle WebCenter Portal is delivering mobile content creation, infrastructure, and collaboration to keep you connected on the go. Additional Information Conference: Oracle OpenWorld Products and Services: MIDDLEWARE: Portal, Content Management, Web...