Adding MobileXML to Oracle Portal Pages

9-12 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal

4. Click View Page to preview the mobile page.

This view provides a good indication of how the page will look when it is displayed on a mobile device.

9.7.4 Step 4 Configure a home page for mobile users

Although it is not mandatory, we recommend that you specify a home page to be displayed when you access Oracle Portal from a mobile device. The mobile home page is independent from the desktop home page. See Section 2.1.4, Choosing Your Home Page . The Mobile Home Page setting is also a convenient way to access new mobile pages during testing.

9.7.5 Step 5 Contact Oracle Portal from a mobile device

To contact Oracle Portal using a mobile device, use the same URL that you would use to access the portal from a desktop browser, that is, use the form: http:host:portportalpagedad Oracle Portal detects the non-html access and redirects the mobile device to the OracleAS Wireless Service URL specified on the Mobile tab of the Global Settings page. See also Section 9.7.2, Step 2 Configure mobile access for Oracle Portal . Some mobile devices and simulators do not properly support redirection. In these cases the mobile device may display some form of error. To work around this problem enter the OracleAS Wireless Service URL mentioned previously directly into the mobile device. The mobile home page is displayed in the mobile device; the page title is shown, together with links to the portlets on the page. In the sample page you created in Step 3, there will be just one portlet link displaying the portlets Short Display Name. Click the portlet link to view the portlet content in the mobile device. As stated earlier, accessing a portal from a real mobile device rather than a simulator is a matter of network configuration rather than Oracle Portal or OracleAS Wireless server configuration. If the network is correctly configured generally involving access from the Internet to some machine on an intranet, these steps remain the same.

9.8 Using the OracleAS Wireless DebuggerSimulator

The OracleAS Wireless server has a basic built-in debugger that includes a simulator. You can access the debugger from OracleAS Wireless by: ■ Clicking the test button of the portal service, or ■ Choosing to debug the portal service. The simulator looks and behaves like a PDA, and offers nothing more than simple browsing capabilities. The simulator is part of the service debugging process that enables you to choose which device http headers the simulation passes on to Oracle Portal the simulator does not change to look like the chosen device, but the headers sent to Oracle Portal will differ. This enables you to send requests to Oracle Portal as if they are coming from a PDA and then to send requests to Oracle Portal as if they were coming from a mobile phone. This may be useful if you want to check portlets that are set up to display markup targeted at specific devices. Working with Pages Designed for Mobile Devices 9-13 If caching is enabled for the Oracle Portal page you are debugging, do not switch device types while using the OracleAS Wireless debug tool. If you need to switch device types, exit the tool, clear out any cookies, and then log back in to the OracleAS Wireless debug tool and continue your tests. If you do not, the Portal cache may contain contradictory information and this can result in unexpected behavior.

9.9 Troubleshooting Mobile Pages

Page portlets do not display properly on my mobile device. The value of page portlets for mobile portals is somewhat limited. Given that the behavior of page portlets on mobile devices is not intuitive, it is best to avoid the use of page portlets when building mobile portals. I receive a Service Error message If you receive the message while logging in to Oracle Portal, see the section above. If the error occurs at any other time, you will need to investigate the behavior of the OracleAS Wireless server. To start with, determine if any service can be run on the server. For example, can the OracleAS Wireless examples be executed from a mobile device or simulator? If not, then it is likely that there is a configuration problem with the installation in general. If the OracleAS Wireless examples work then review the contents of the sys_ panama.log error log for the OracleAS Wireless server. This log file is located in either ORACLE_HOMEwirelesslogs or vartmp. The log file records information about the response from the services causing problems Oracle Portal in this case and so shows if they are returning error statuses or invalid OracleAS Wireless XML. You can then correlate this information with the access_log of the Oracle HTTP Server process to find which requests are failing for example, a servlet request or a mod_plsql request. Depending on the findings of this research it may be necessary to contact your support representative. I receive the following error message: A Temporary Error Has... This error message is rendered by the Parallel Page Engine PPE. The PPE is sufficiently mobile aware to render error documents of type textvnd.oracle.mobilexml in the event of an error. The PPE is most exposed to errors when it is attempting to fetch the page metadata from the database. There is generally information in the metadata telling the PPE how to handle errors, but if the database’s response to the PPE’s request for metadata is not a valid metadata document, or an explicit error document, then the PPE must act on its own to render an error document for the user. When rendering error documents for standard desktop browsers the PPE simply takes the error document that resulted from the metadata call to the database and passes it to the end user. Desktop browsers can handle numerous content types, and for the content types that they cannot handle they will generally prompt for the document to be saved to disk. However, in the case of a mobile user this is probably not appropriate or even possible. Therefore error documents for mobile requests must be in OracleAS Wireless XML. Thus, if the PPE is servicing a mobile request and the database renders an error document, rather than metadata, that is not valid OracleAS Wireless XML the PPE: ■ Writes the document into the WLS_PORTAL-diagnostic.log MW_HOME\user_ projects\domains\DomainName\servers\WLS_PORTAL\logs.