Troubleshooting Oracle Fusion Middleware Online Documentation Library

Interacting with Your Portal 2-35 The Search page group selection box does not seem to be working properly. Some page groups are not displayed and some display incorrectly. Do any of the page group names contain a comma? If the name of a page group contains one or more commas it does not display properly in search-related page group selection boxes. This is because the comma character is used as the delimiter between page group names. For example, a page group named Sales, London, UK, might appear as three, separate, selectable page group names instead of just a single page group. The extra, invalid page group entries get displayed instead of valid page groups and therefore you might also find that some page groups appear unavailable. Report your problem to the page group administrator. Page group administrators are advised not to use commas within page group names due to this issue. If page group names are not the issue, you might find that the search portlet is set up to exclude certain page groups. Contact the page owner, to see if the page group restriction can be removed. When I edit the page, the Pending Items Preview link does not display in the page toolbar. When a tab that is on a public page has restricted access, such that users cannot add items to the tab without approval, the Pending Items Preview link does not display. This is because the page toolbar displays according to page settings and not tab settings. You can still get to preview mode: ■ Edit the page, and change the mode setting in the portal pages URL to _mode=25. ■ Access the page through the My Approval Status portlet. I uploaded a draft item but cannot see it on my page. Pending, rejected, and deleted rejected items are not displayed either. Drafts do not display as expected when the page that contains the draft item is cached at the system level. To avoid access problems, do not cache pages or templates at the system level when Approvals and Notifications are enabled. See Section 21.1, Page Caching. I cannot see my approval notifications. There are two portlets for listing approval notifications: ■ Notifications for approvals initiated by an Oracle Portal approval process are shown in the My Notifications portlet. ■ Notifications for approvals initiated by an Oracle BPEL workflow process are shown in the My Worklist portlet. If your portal uses a mixture of Oracle Portal and Oracle BPEL approval processes, make sure that you include and check both portlets for notifications. 2-36 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal Part II Part II Planning Your Portal Part II contains the following chapters: ■ Chapter 3, Planning Your Portal ■ Chapter 4, Working with Page Groups ■ Chapter 5, Preparing to Add Content 3 Planning Your Portal 3-1 3 Planning Your Portal If you are responsible for building a portal for others to populate with content, this chapter can help you. As the page group administrator, your job is to think about the portal as a whole and the needs of the community it will serve. Among other things, you must decide how many page groups your portal should comprise, how to approach portal development, and how to optimize a given page group for the purposes it will serve. To build an effective portal, it’s important to arm yourself with knowledge and to do some careful planning before embarking upon the actual work of creating the portal. Section 3.1, Getting Up to Speed contains three sections to help you acquire the knowledge you need: ■ Section 3.1.1, Approaching Your Portal discusses the ways in which people tend to tackle the portal-building process, and offers some recommendations to help you get off on the right foot. ■ Section 3.1.2, Knowing Your Audience defines the different user groups typically found at most enterprises. ■ Section 3.1.3, Key Concepts and Terms gives you an overview of the components comprising Oracle Portal. After reading this section, you’ll be well positioned to take advantage of the wealth of features available to you in this product. Once you’ve digested the information in Section 3.1, Getting Up to Speed , you’ll be ready to start tackling the job of creating the portal itself. You’ll find that you can build your portal in less time, and achieve far more sophisticated results, if you take the time to study the information in Section 3.2, Making Key Decisions , which contains: ■ Section 3.2.1, Understanding the Planning Process sketches out the decisions you need to make, in the rough order you’ll need to make them. ■ Section 3.2.2, Using Page Groups Effectively introduces the concept of devoting page groups to discrete groups of users, rather than having a possibly diverse set of users share a single page group. Note: Before you begin your work, make sure that the portal administrator has already completed all the necessary portal administration tasks, described in the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrators Guide for Oracle Portal. If you’re unfamiliar with either of these highlighted terms or what’s meant by them, see Section 3.1.2, Knowing Your Audience . 3-2 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal ■ If you decide that you need to create a portal specifically for content management purposes, Section 3.2.3, Configuring a Page Group for Content Management discusses some points you’ll want to consider. ■ Section 3.2.4, Deciding What Content To Publish helps you understand the different places from which content can originate and how best to bring them into your portal. While it may be tempting to skip the preliminary information presented in this chapter, it is strongly recommended that you read through it carefully.

3.1 Getting Up to Speed

Before you dive in and start building your portal, it’s essential that you have the background information you need to make informed decisions. This section discusses the learning process associated with Oracle Portal, how to truly understand your audience, and, most important, leads you through all the key concepts you need to know about Oracle Portal itself.

3.1.1 Approaching Your Portal

The way in which you go about building your portal is often a reflection of how you as an individual tend to approach any project of large proportions. The learning process for Oracle Portal seems to fall into three categories: ■ Self-learning. Many users new to Oracle Portal who have nonetheless been given complete responsibility for creating something of value to his or her constituency, prefer to immediately begin experimenting with the product, often implementing a small-scale project just to get the feel for what’s involved before launching into the larger task of creating a portal for users. While this may be the most immediately satisfying approach for some, bear in mind that it is also the approach that will probably call for the most patience and the most re-work. There are many decisions that, poorly made, will have far-reaching impact on your portal down the line. ■ Attending formal education classes, or using self-paced tutorials. Oracle offers a variety of instructor-led training sessions, which can help bring you up to speed on Oracle Portal quickly. Or you can choose from many OBEs Oracle By Example, self-paced educational units that are free and available 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Contact Oracle University for more details, or visit the Oracle Portal Education page on OTN http:portalcenter.oracle.com . ■ Working with an Oracle consultant. You may want to consider establishing a contract with Oracle Consulting to assess your business needs and develop a portal specifically for you. Once your portal is complete, the consultants will help you learn how to maintain and extend your portal. The advantages of this approach are that your learning process will be centered on your own portal as opposed to formal training, which is based on generic scenarios; plus, since the learning curve is not an issue, your portal will no doubt be completed more quickly than if you attempt to build it on your own. The disadvantage, of course, is that the size of your organization and its budget may not make Oracle Consulting an option.

3.1.2 Knowing Your Audience

Keeping your audience firmly in mind as you design and implement your portal is key to creating something that will be truly useful. In working with various companies Planning Your Portal 3-3 and moderating our own development process, we’ve identified six fundamental user groups that you are likely to have in your midst: ■ Viewer - Consumes information; does not publish it. Requires little, if any, Oracle Portal-specific knowledge or skills. Must know how to search to find desired information; may need to know how to customize the display to hide or reveal content. Chapter 2, Interacting with Your Portal contains information that will be of use to the viewers of your portal. You may want to give a copy of this chapter to your users; however, it may be more practical for you to use it as an information source as you prepare your own tutorials and how-to guides. That way, you can illustrate Oracle Portal concepts with concrete examples taken from your own portal, thus solidifying the association in users’ minds. ■ Content Contributor - Publishes content to a portal page. Needs to know how to add and edit content; depending on privileges, may also need to know how to manage them. Chapter 14, Working with Items and Chapter 15, Working with Portlets contain information that will be of use to those who will contribute content to your portal. You may want to use the material in this chapter as the basis for creating or augmenting your own user’s guide, based on real-life examples from your portal. ■ Page DesignerBuilder - Creates pages, usually for others to populate with content. Extends pages with simple wizard-created components; feeds portlet requirements to developers. May populate page with content through such means as OmniPortlet and WebClipping. Grants page access to appropriate users and user groups. May set up some reusable components navigation pages, styles, templates, and so on. Chapter 6, Creating Pages , in particular, contains information targeted to the page designersbuilders at your site. ■ Page Group Administrator - If you are reading this, you’re probably a page group administrator. Your tasks include: deciding how to implement the portal: whether to use one page group or many, deciding how deeply to nest pages, and so on; determining the need for and creating custom item and page types; creating categories and perspectives; establishing workflow processes; policing the content contribution effort; feeding requirements to page designers. To maintain consistency, you may have complete or partial control over developing reusable objects navigation pages, styles, templates, and so on. All of the information in this volume, Building Your Portal, was developed to help you do your job successfully. ■ Portal Administrator - Installs and configures Oracle Portal and its subsystems. Sets up users and user groups; monitors performance and maintains acceptable levels; manages the Portlet Repository; performs upgrades and adds software patches; registers portlet providers. Portal administrators should refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrators Guide for Oracle Portal. The tasks in this User’s Guide assume that all necessary configuration activities have already been completed. ■ Developer - Builds things, such as components and portlets, for others to include on their pages. Relies heavily on the APIs to extend the capabilities of Oracle Portal; may frequently consult the Knowledge Exchange or the forums for advice or inspiration. 3-4 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal See Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Oracle Portal. This book describes the technologies available for portlet developers, discusses how to choose the best technology to meet the given requirements, and guides developers in using the appropriate tools to deploy their developed portlets.

3.1.3 Key Concepts and Terms

This section introduces fundamental Oracle Portal concepts and weaves them together so you’ll have a good working knowledge of their importance; however, each concept is treated much more exhaustively elsewhere in this book. Much of what you need to know is depicted in the following diagram: Figure 3–1 Anatomy of a Page Group Let’s examine this diagram section by section: Hierarchy of Pages, Anatomy of a Page, and Reusable Objects. Hierarchy of Pages One of the first things you need to know is that in Oracle Portal, a portal is a collection of one or more page groups. At its core, a page group is a hierarchical collection of pages. A page is the face of the portal—what the user interacts with to access information and applications. Oracle Portal pages are flexible enough to contain any HTML content. They can be created and structured declaratively, through browser-based wizards, or defined programatically as JavaServer Pages. Information on portal pages is published as either portlets or items, both of which are described later in this chapter. A page group is exactly what it sounds like: a group of pages for which common attributes and mechanisms can be established that govern the behavior of the pages it contains. You can construct your entire portal within one page group, or use different page groups as sub-portals targeted at specific communities within your organization. Many vital decisions and configurations are specified at the page group level by you, the page group administrator. At the far left of the diagram, notice that the top of the page group is called a root page. Every other page within a page group is a sub-page of the root page. When you create a page group, a root page is automatically created for you using the same name as the page group itself. Root pages are often used to construct your portal’s or sub-portal’s home page.