Key Concepts and Terms
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.
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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:
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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.
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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.
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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
Planning Your Portal 3-7
to the Oracle Portal Developer Services, you can access a number of services and resources available exclusively to the Portal developer community. Not only will
you be able to access the development team within Oracle, but you can tap into the greater community of Portal developers who have acquired expertise in
working with portlets. And you can publish Portal development knowledge and experience of your own.
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An item is the other basic Oracle Portal building block. More specifically, an item is an individual piece of content text, hyperlink, image, and so on that resides on a
page in an item region. There are two types of items: content item types, which display user-managed content such as text, files, images, and URLs; and
navigation item types, which are used to provide navigation and to access or execute various portal-specific functions. Items are added to the portal through
simple wizards and stored in the Oracle Metadata Repository for ongoing management and publishing. If you plan to use Oracle Portal as a content
management solution, you’ll no doubt rely heavily on the use of items.
Reusable Objects Reusable objects are created at the page group level and can be used for any page
within the page group. For example, you may want to create a consistent color scheme called a style for every page within your portal. Even though the graphic doesn’t
depict it, pages themselves can be considered reusable objects, as any page can be published as a portlet and reusedshared elsewhere in the portal, or in remote portals.
Some objects control how pages are laid out and how they appear. Others help users organize and classify information so that others can locate it quickly. The following
screen shot depicts the Page Group portlet, which is used to create and manage all reusable objects. The Page Group portlet is an important workspace that you’ll use a
great deal as you develop your portal.
Figure 3–4 Page Groups Portlet
In most cases, each time a page is displayed it is dynamically assembled and formatted according to the content portlets and items and the reusable objects chosen for that
page.
3-8 Oracle Fusion Middleware Users Guide for Oracle Portal
Layout and Appearance A template is a type of page from which other pages can inherit layout, style,
privileges, and even content, thus enforcing consistency across multiple pages. A Portal Template might include a corporate logo, frequently used links at the top, a
navigation bar, and a footer that shows the location of the current page within the page group. When you create a new page, you have the option of selecting a Portal
Template on which to base it, or to choose no template at all. Styles control the colors, fonts, and backgrounds of pages or regions within pages.
When you use the Create Page wizard, you are asked to supply the navigation page, template, and style you want to apply. If you choose not to apply these objects when
you create the page, you can always do so later when you edit the page.
Content Attribution Content attribution concerns you much more if you’re building a page group that
supports collaboration among your users. Collaboration is chiefly supported through Oracle Portal’s content management features, which center on the use of items.
Content attribution refers to the process of associating various attributes with each item and page in your portal. These attributes store information and make it easy to
group logically related items and pages together. Attributes also enable advanced metadata searches.
When you add a file to the portal, for example, you use the Add Item Wizard. This wizard prompts you for an item type. The kinds of item types that are exposed
through the Add Item Wizard are determined by the page group administrator. Suppose you choose the File item type, which comes with Oracle Portal by default.
The File item type has certain default attributes, like File Name, Description, Author, and so on, which you as the publisher of the file are expected to supply in order to
complete the publication process. These attributes not only supply information about the file you’re adding, but allow you or others to later construct custom searches so
that you can, say, display all the content published by a given author. Custom searches are easy to build in Oracle Portal.
But suppose the attributes that come with the File item type aren’t sufficient for your needs. Suppose you want to add another attribute called Group Name, to identify the
group from which the file originated. With Oracle Portal, you can easily create your own custom attributes using the Create Attribute wizard. At a minimum, simply
identify the Group Name attribute as a Text attribute, add it to the definition of the file item type, and you’re done.
You may also want to create custom item types specifically for your needs. For example, if you’re managing an entertainment portal, you might create a custom item type
called Movie Review, which includes custom attributes such as Rating, Reviewer, and Producer. You can even specify which attributes are mandatory and which are
optional.
Custom page types operate on the same principle. By default, Oracle Portal comes with several different page types optimized for use with different types of content. For
example, the Standard page type is used to display both portlet and items, and thus is used for the majority of all portal development. Other page types include JSP pages,
which display the results of executing a JavaServer Page, and URL pages, which allow you to include any Web-accessible page within your portal. However, you may
Note: Whether or not the page is rebuilt each time it is displayed
depends on the caching options in place at the time the page request is made.
Planning Your Portal 3-9
encounter situations where you want to modify the page types already in existence, or require additional page types. For example, you might want to create a Performance
Review page for use by managers, which contains attributes for Rating, Employee Name, Employee Rank, and so on. Like custom item types, custom page types are easy
to create to meet your specific requirements.
Categories and perspectives represent a different type of content attribution at the item level. Both are a means of classifying your content into discrete groups, making it easy
for users to locate content. A Human Resources page group might contain categories such as Benefits, Policies, and Payroll. Each time a user adds a piece of content, that
content must be assigned to one and only one category assuming that the Category attribute is exposed for the item type. Users can also search by category and
perspective or browse through content that is organized into category and perspective hierarchies.
Perspectives work best when they cut across multiple categories. Because each item can be assigned many perspectives, it’s best to reserve them for classifications that take
advantage of this strength. In our Human Resources page group, you might choose to make your perspectives reflect the various user groups at the company: Engineers,
Design Analysts, Sales Representatives, and so on. It’s easy to imagine how the same piece of content, like the company’s holiday schedule, would interest all users
regardless of their user group. When a user submits a search based on Engineers, Oracle Portal would locate all the content tagged with that perspective, irrespective of
category. Engineers would see the holiday schedule, as well as all other content from the Benefits, Policies, and Payroll that had been flagged as being of particular interest
to that group. Or, on a portal devoted to travel, the perspectives Inexpensive, Moderate, and Luxury would neatly cut across the categories Lodging, Restaurants,
Air Fare, and Rental Cars.
Deciding how to construct all of your attributes is an important part of building your portal taxonomy, and making these decisions should be attended to with care. One of
the main benefits of creating a sound attribution model is that it provides you with more flexibility if you choose to publish content dynamically, using the autoquery
capability of the custom search portlet. The autoquery feature is extremely powerful, especially when you configure it to display the results in place. Effective use of
autoquery gives you tremendous control over how and where you manage and publish content within your portal. In fact, in many cases it is best to manage content
in one area or page group and publish it dynamically throughout the portal. See
Section 3.2, Making Key Decisions for more information.