Knowing Your Audience Getting Up to Speed

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. Planning Your Portal 3-5 Another important concept to the development of any portal is that of security. As page group administrator, you can grant varying levels of access to entire page groups, individual pages, tabs, or even discrete items on a page. You can either make these objects publicly available, or control them through an access control list, which states which users and groups can interact with the object and to what extent. You can also grant permission to manipulate the access control list to other users as required. Anatomy of a Page In this section of the diagram, three essential concepts are illustrated: regions, portlets, and items. Every page can be carved up into one or more regions. You accomplish this using tools that are available when editing a page. The following picture shows three pages with three different region configurations. Figure 3–2 Three Different Region Configurations Each region has its own set of options that control how the content within it is displayed. For example, you can specify the width of the region relative to the page, what kind of content the region can contain, and whether to display borders around the portlets in a portlet region. Regions can also include one or more tabs. Regions make it easy to devote areas of the page to specific functions. For example, it is quite common to use the top region of a page for a banner, one alongside the left for a navigation bar, and perhaps another along the bottom for a footer, as shown in this example: 3-6 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal Figure 3–3 Sample Page In Oracle Portal, all three of these elements are called navigation pages. You can use Oracle Portal to create navigation pages, or have your graphics designer develop HTML to fulfill this need. The remaining regions, such as the one shown to the right of the navigation bar in this picture, are the placeholders for the content your portal displays. In Oracle Portal, there are two types of content: portlets and items. ■ Think of a portlet as a reusable building block for easily publishing information and applications. You can instantly deliver new content to thousands of users by simply adding a portlet to the users view of the portal. All portlets come from a data source registered within Oracle Portal, called a portlet provider. The information displayed within portlets comes from a number of sources. Some portlets are as easy to create as checking a box within a wizard; others require knowledge of PLSQL or Java. You can create portlets in a various ways: ■ Publish pages and navigation pages as portlets. While in the creation wizard, simply check a box to indicate that you want to publish the page as a portlet. That way, you can re-use the page on other pages, or make the page available for others to use. ■ Use Oracle Portals wizards to easily create reports, forms, charts, and other types of dynamic components and publish them as portlets. No programming knowledge is required. ■ Use your own tools to turn your legacy applications and Web sources into portlets and integrate them through Portals Application Programming Interfaces APIs, available in the Portal Developer Kit PDK. See the Oracle Fusion Middleware Developers Guide for Oracle Portal. But you don’t have to create your own portlets. Simply by installing Oracle Portal, you instantly have access to portlets created by a wide range of third-party vendors registered through Oracle’s Partner Program. In addition, by subscribing