Post-Migration Configuration Migrating from URL-Based Portlets

Creating Content-Based Portlets with Web Clipping 5-25 Note the following: ■ Whatever modifications you make to the clipping will affect it at the portlet definition level and therefore will affect all the instances of that portlet which may exist across Portal pages. ■ When you modify the clipping and you have made the portlet rendering to be Inline, and have registered the provider with a Login Frequency of Once per User Session , then page viewers who have an instance of the particular portlet on their page, will need to log out of Oracle Portal and log in again to see the changes implemented. This feature avoids disruption of the page viewers usage of a particular portlet when it is being modified. ■ For portlets with Web Clippings that require authentication to an external application prior to accessing the page containing the clip, the off-line editing mechanism detailed in the previous item does not provide such authentication information. Consequently, there is no way to modify the migrated clipping if the original URL-based portlet uses external applications. There is currently no workaround for this limitation.

5.6.5 Limitations in Migrating URL-Based Portlets

This sections describes limitations in migrating URL-based portlets to Web Clipping and describes some differences between the two methods. Following are the differences: ■ There is a fundamental difference between URL-based portlets and Web Clipping in the way that clippings are defined. URL-based portlets use the headerTrimTags and footerTrimTags tags to define the begin and end of a particular section in an HTML page. On the other hand, Web Clippings use the HTML tag path for example, htmlbodytable[2]tr[2]td[1] to denote the path to use when looking for an HTML tag that would contain the clipping within the page. While the header and footer trim tags for URL-based portlets offer greater flexibility that is, the clipping does not need to reside within one single HTML tag, it is not as robust. When a clipping can no longer be found in the same location within a page, there is no way to apply fuzzy matching logic to find the clipping again. On the other hand, Web Clipping stores key pieces of information to locate the clipping within the page. If the clipping is not in the same location, the fuzzy match feature looks for other candidates on the same HTML page to account for the possibility that the clip may have moved. ■ The migration tool tries to find the clipping HTML Tag that encapsulates the headerTrimTags and footerTrimTags. Often, this will not be the exact HTML that was extracted by the URL-based portlet. In these cases, the entire Web page will be returned as the content of the migrated Web Clipping Portlet. To amend this, simply edit the portlet. ■ URL-based portlets that have been migrated to Web Clipping do not support proxy authentication by default. This is because URL-based portlets inherently do not support proxy authentication and Web Clipping preserves the edit mode of the portlets. Their edit mode does not provide an opportunity to enter authentication information. To work around this restriction, add an empty Web Clipping portlet to the same portal and use the Web Clipping portlet Personalize link to enter the user name and password for proxy authentication. ■ URL-based portlets that used external applications are migrated as full-page Web Clipping portlets. This means that the URL previously specified by the URL-based 5-26 Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Oracle Portal portlet definition will be the one used to display the full page after the log in process. Whatever headerTrimTags and footerTrimTags you have previously specified will be lost, because external application integration occurs at the Portal side while the migration tool only handles the provider side. Because you are not connected to any Portal instances at the time of the migration, and the external applications framework resides only on the Portal side, the migration tool cannot fetch the authentication information necessary to log in to parse the HTML and use the headerTrimTags and footerTrimTags that you have previously specified to compute an HTML Tag Path to store in the Web Clipping Definition. In maintaining migrated portlets, you can edit the clipping through links in the test page. However, this does not include URL-based portlets that used external applications to authenticate themselves to the external sites. There is currently no workaround for this issue. ■ URL-based portlets that use the XML Filter cannot be migrated to Web Clipping portlets because there is a lack of such a functionality in the Web Clipping Portlet. Before proceeding with migration, make sure that you have backed up the URL-based portlets that use the XML Filter into a separate URL-based portlet provider. You must do this because the migration occurs at the provider level. That is, upon interpreting that a particular provider.xml file has URLProviderDefinition for its provider definition class, all the portlet definitions contained within that provider definition are migrated.

5.7 Current Limitations for Web Clipping

This section describes current limitations for Web Clipping. For information about the latest limitations in a release, be sure to read the Oracle Portal Release Notes. Following are the limitations: ■ If the site to which you are connecting uses a large amount of JavaScript to manipulate cookies or uses the JavaScript method document.write to modify the HTML document being written, you may not be able to clip content from the site. ■ When you integrate with partner applications through the use of mod_osso, you cannot clip directly through those partner applications in an authenticated manner. However, you can use the partner applications through the external application framework. ■ You cannot use the Web Clipping portlet to clip Oracle Portal pages. As a workaround, examine the portlet that is supplying the data and take the appropriate action, as follows: – For database provider portlets, use exportimport to copy pages across portals. – For Web provider portlets, re-register the same provider in the destination portal and edit the portal manually. ■ You cannot use the Web Clipping portlet to clip a Web page that contains more that one frame, that is, a frameset. ■ Note the following about Web Clipping and the use of cascading style sheets CSS: – If a Web page contains more than one portlet that uses a CSS, they should not conflict if the CSS uses distinct style names, such as OraRef, to specify a style within an HTML tag, rather than using an HTML tag name, such as A, as the name of the style.