WebCenter PS5 Installation - Quick guide - WebLogic Server

The order in which you install the different components may vary.
I like to start with the software installations.
So we start with WebLogic Server.

After downloading the WebLogic 10.3.6 software, unzip the zip file.
Note: There is no Java included, so either download that separately, or copy the Java folder from a previous install :) (I've got PS4 on my laptop as well, so I just used that Java home)

Assumed platform is Windows...

Start the installer by opening a command prompt and start java with the just extracted jar file.

When the installer is extracted, the welcome screen is displayed.
Click next to proceed.

It's best to create a new middleware home, if it is only to independent of other software

Enter the Middleware home directory.

If you do not wish to be kept informed avbout security updates, uncheck the check box.
Note: The checkbox will not be unchecked. Just continue...

Since there's no email address, and the checkbox is selected, you'll receive another confirmation prompt. Just continue...

I always select typical install, as I want to have it all...

Browse to the location of your Java home.

I selected my copied Java tree.

The path for WebLogic Server and Coherence are fine. Just leave them and click Next

I'ld rather not have shortcuts because I do not use them anyway but we cannot deselect shortcuts. So lets create them for me only. Click Next

At the summary click next.

The quickstart would enable you to create a domain.
But first we want to install the WebCenter Portal and WebCenter Content software.
If we install that software first we can select the software to be deployed in the domain at creation.
If we create the domain now, we need to extend it later with the additional functionality.
So uncheck Run Quickstart and click Done.

That's it. The WebLogic Server 10.3.6 is installed. Lets proceed to the next step, installing the WebCenter Portal software.

WebCenter PS5 Installation - Quick guide - Overview

WebCenter PS5 Installation - Quick guide


The installation instructions for installing WebCenter Portal PS5 are described more than good in the Oracle documentation. The documentation keeps improving. If Oracle continues like this, we don't have to blog about installations anymore :(

One small gllitch I found was the fact that the checkbox "I wish to receive security updates via My Oracle Support" remains checked if you try to uncheck it.
Just continue with the installers and you will be prompted if you do not wish to be informed (as any developer wants :) )

The process I followed is the following (I already had a DB installed, if you do not have one, please install this first)

• Install WebLogic Server 10.3.6
• Install WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.6.0
• Install WebCenter Content 11.1.1.6.0
• Create the repository schema's
• Create the domain
• Start the Managed Servers
• Configure WebCenter Portal Spaces

Start by downloading the required software from Oracle.
Easiest is to use http://edelivery.oracle.com
Log in to the system and if you get the search page, navigate to https://edelivery.oracle.com/EPD/Download/get_form?egroup_aru_number=11571971
Download the following zip's:

WebLogic Server 10.3.6           V29856-01
WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.6.0      V29752-01
WebCenter Content 11.1.1.6.0     V29776-01 Part 1 of 2 
                             and V29776-01 Part 2 of 2
Repository Creation Utility      V26018-01 (Windows)
Optionally, download JDeveloper if you plan to create your own WebCenter Portal applications:
JDeveloper 11g 11.1.1.6.0        V29790-01
JDeveloper 11.1.1.6.0 extensions V29774-01

The rest of the process is done in about 60 steps.

To post all of these in one article would be a bit overkill, so please see the different parts of the installation.

Install WebLogic Server 10.3.6
Install WebCenter Portal 11.1.1.6.0
Install WebCenter Content 11.1.1.6.0
Create the repository schema's
Create the domain
Start the Managed Servers
Configure WebCenter Portal Spaces (Coming soon)

The birth of a WebCenter based Intranet - 1

In this series of posts we follow an imaginary company, lets call it 'Bunny Inc.' on their WebCenter based Intranet implementation
The posts describe the steps they need to take, the functionality they will implement and the challenges they meet during the project.

Since they have a number of Intranet renewal failures, they do not want a huge project which will take 6 months or more to deliver something just to see it does not meet their requirements.
In stead, they want a basic Intranet in little time and extend the Intranet over time.

When we were called to assist Bunny Inc. in this process, we did an intake.
During the intake process, we made an inventory of requirements they have for the Intranet. Not just for the first release, but also for the long(er) term Intranet.
At first Bunny Inc. was reluctant to cooperate as they were afraid we wanted to make the implementation a huge project. Fortunately we were able to convince them the long term vision was necessary to make sure we make the correct decisions during the implementation of the first phase that would not bite us in a next phase which would mean we would have to do rework.

We refer to this as Think Big, Start Small.

During the intake, Bunny Inc. provided us with the following required functionality:

• Informing employees about (new) developments within the organization
• Publishing events (calendar)
• Yellow pages (employee information like name, email address, phone number etc)
  Information should be modifiable by the employee
• Enable employees to get more involved in the content on the Intranet
• Being able to share experiences and knowledge
• Provide personal information such as:
• Company car information
• Health insurance information
• Reviews / evaluations
• Presence reports
• Etc

Read how we went along in the next episode.

Content Presenter does not return any documents for a query

If you add a Content Presenter taskflow to your WebvCenter (Spaces) application and want to shown content as a result of a query, it might happen that the query does not return any documents.
Normal procedure would be:

1. Go to edit mode in the page (CTRL-SHIFT-E)
   
   
2. Click Add Content
   
3. From the folder Content Management, select Content Presenter
   
   
   
   
4. Close the repository
   
5. Click the first edit icon
   
   
6. Click the button Select Content
   
7. As Content Source, select Results of a Query
   
8. Enter the query criteria and click Preview Results to see... a preview of the results.
   
   

Even though you're sure that the selection criteria should at least match one or more content items, the preview remains empty.

No errors show up in either the WebCenter log file or the Content Server log file.

The problem is most likely in the configuration of the Content Server.

If you check the config.cfg from the content server, you probably are missing to directives:

• SearchIndexerEngineName
• IndexerDatabaseProviderName

These tell the content server to use the Oracle Text Search features. Without these, the query will not result in any hits.

Change the $DOMAIN_HOME/ucm/cs/config/config.cfg file and add the two following lines:

SearchIndexerEngineName=OracleTextSearch

IndexerDatabaseProviderName=SystemDatabase

Save the file and restart both the content server managed server and the WebCenter managed server.

If you retry the Preview results, you should get results.

Deploying a WebCenter application - Simple

When you have developed your WebCenter application and want to deploy it to a standalone Weblogic server, you can do it in several ways.
First (in an ideal world) you would deploy it to a development environment.
Often, developers have (unlimited) access to the development environment.
A quick way to deploy your WebCenter application is from JDeveloper.
To use this method, you need access to the admin server. This is the reason why you probably cannot deploy this way to test or production environments.

How do we deploy from JDeveloper:

1. When you're ready for testing the application on a development environment, open the Application menu and select deploy, then your application
   
   
   
   
2. Select Deploy to Application Server as we want to deploy it directly and click Next.
   
   
3. If you already created a connection to your admin server, select it and click Next. Then proceed to step 9
   Otherwise, click the + image at the top right hand corner
   
   
4. Enter a name for the connection, e.g. development-server and click Next
   
   
5. Enter the admin username / password for the admin server and click Next
   
   
6. Enter the connection details for the domain, and click Next
   
   
7. Test the connection (you never know) and click Finish
   
   
8. Select the connection and click Next
   
   
   
9. Select Deploy to selected instances in the domain, select a server (preferably a custom server, otherwise a server with the WebCenter libraries targetted) A safe choice is the WC_Spaces server.
Click Finish





10. After some time, a Deployment Configuration wizard will popup.
    On the MDS tab, you can select the Metadata Store and the partition within the MDS



11. On the connections tab you can modify the connection details.
    For different environments, you might have different servers providing different services.
    If you would like to change connections, select the connection and click the pencil icon
    
    
    
    
12. Change the connection details and click OK
    
    
    
13. Finally, click Deploy to deploy your application.
    
    
    
14. Run the application by going to the URL in the browser:
    http://localhost:8888/reference-Portal-context-root
    
    
    


For deployments using other methods, keep an eye on the blog.

How to call a Web Service Data Control with pre-populated search criteria

I'ld like to present you with the following challenge:

We have an interface between our ADF application to a back-end application (Siebel) via Middleware, based of Web Services.
Given the datamodel of Siebel, you can image the complexity of the Web Service.

When the Web Service is called, some input values must be supplied.
These values should not be entered by the end-user, but should be 'hidden' from the user and defined by the application (e.g. Calling Application) or defined by navigation (e.g. contact ID, customer ID etc)

All the instructions and posts we have found on integrating Web Services via Data Controls  basically describe the following:
 - Create a Data Control based on the Web Service
 - Create a JSF page
 - Drag one (or more) of the input parameters to the page (all that you need)
 - Drag the WebServiceMethodCall(Object) to the page as an ADF page 
 - Drag one (or more) of the response fields to the page

To illustrate the WebServiceMethodCall see this image:

When you run the page, the web service is called (without parameters) and the result is displayed on the page.
On the page, you can enter some search criteria, and press the button
Then the web service is called and the page displays the result.

Now the challenge is:
How do we pre-populate the search criteria, bases on some application scope value (application name) and some session scope value (contact id) and make sure that the first call to the web service is done with these values.

Any idea's are more then welcome.

Answer will be posted as soon as we have it...
The question is also posted on the OTN ADF / JDeveloper forum

local part cannot be "null" when creating a QName using Soap UI Mock Service

This week we fixed a major issue in our project.

Case
We're building a support portal in Web Center for an international customer. The portal interfaces to a number of back office systems, like Siebel, eBusiness Suite etc.
These interfaces are serviced by IBM Web Sphere and the logic in the service bus has (of course) to be developed.
The development starts with the WSDL of the web service we need to call. Once this WSDL is defined, we can start building.
However, we need an actual web service to test our implementation.

Solution
We used Soap UI in the past to test web services. Amazingly Soap UI has a feature to create a mock service. Basically a stub web service, based upon a WSDL.
In this mock service, you can define the response that is sent back upon a request, so you can test your application with 'live' data.
With this mock service, we created a data control based on the web service in JDeveloper and added this to a page (pretty straight forward, see a number of blog posts regarding this topic)
However, when we run the page we get an error: local part cannot be "null" when creating a QName

What is going on???
We read a lot of posts, forum entries and even raised a Service Request at Oracle Support. No answer however in more then a week.
Since all generated code is xml, we can't debug properly to see what went wrong.

Analysis
The WSDL and associated includes a lot of complex types. Is this causing the issue?
Will this work with a web service without complex input or output parameters?Also, we see six calls to the mock service in Soap UI (in the log section). Is this caused by some sort of retry mechanism?

To investigate, we built two separate web services, one with complex output and one without complex output.  When we created mock services in Soap UI, both resulted in the same error. Is there something wrong with the 'data control based on a web service' in ADF?
To test, we deployed the web services to an actual WebLogic Server.
When we call this web service from the application, we don't get an error!
So the mechanism works, but what goes wrong?

There is a potential issue in the headers. The mock service gzips the response. Also, the content type header value is set to test/xml, which 'should' be application/xml
Can it be ADF handles this incorrect (or not at all)??
With Soap UI we call the deployed web service to view the differences. Besides the fact that there are more header variables, the ones that also exist in the mock service header, have the same values.
Can it then be in the response itself???
The XML in the response seems the same. Only differences are namespaces and how the namespaces are defined, but that should not be a problem.
The response from the mock service also contains some comments to indicate which fields are optional and which sections can be repeated. But comments in XML is legal so this too should not be a problem...

But it is :(
We copied the response from the deplloyed web service to the mock service (the mock service response can be edited to return the data you want) and with the response copied from the deployed service, the call worked in ADF!
It took another 10 minutes to identify the comments to be the cause.

Solution
We're still not sure what goes wrong in the ADF application, but apparently one of the layers cannot handle comments in the response.
Edit the response to not include any comments. This will run the application smoothly.
Total Time Spent: Over a week.
Time Spent Next Time: None (thanks to this post ;)