Oracle Portal 3.0.8 Release Notes January 2001

Contents
Installation and Setup Installation Administration Upgrading from previous releases Login troubleshooting High security in Internet Explorer 5 Documentation New features in Oracle Portal 3.0.8 Documentation Additional information Oracle Portal partners | Usage Notes In-place rendering of URLs Document name restrictions Portal Development Kit Distributed providers support Import/Export with security information Forms limitations Recent objects portlet Charts Center alignment of tabs National Language Support

Installation
Following are the known issues in the installation of Oracle Portal: To run the part of the installation that installs the online help on Solaris, you must have C shell because the Solaris installation of help calls a .csh file.

Login troubleshooting
If users are having trouble logging in, the Portal administrator should refer to the troubleshooting section of the Oracle Portal 3.0 Configuration Guide.

High security in Internet Explorer 5
If you set up your Internet Explorer 5 browser to have the highest possible security, then you may experience problems in displaying the Oracle Portal public home page. You may need to reduce the security setting in Internet Explorer 5 to see the Oracle Portal home page. You can change your security settings from the Security tab of the Internet Options dialog in Internet Explorer.

Documentation
The official product name for Oracle Portal is now Oracle9i Application Server Portal. Within the documentation, you will continue to see the shortened product name, Oracle Portal, merely for the sake of brevity.

Additional Information
For white papers, demonstrations, a tutorial, documented examples, and our latest documentation, please visit the Oracle Technology Network and go to the Documentation section for Oracle Portal.

Oracle Portal partners
For information on the products and services provided by Oracle Portal partners, please visit the Portal Partner Initiatives section of www.oracle.com.

New features in Oracle Portal 3.0.8
New security model for public database objects The PUBLIC schema is set only if the portal user belongs to the database administrator (DBA) group. The Grant Access link is implemented for the PUBLIC schema and behaves just as it does for any other schema. Actions on the PUBLIC objects can only be performed by users who have the MANAGE privilege on the PUBLIC schema. New component types Two new application component types have been added for this release: The URL component allows you to build a component defined by a URL. The XML component allows you to specify an XML document, style sheet, and DTD to build the component. Page templates You can create a page template that can be used for pages as well as applications in this release. Under Shared Components, you can create an unstructured page template that can be applied to your pages. Enhanced menu security The new security model in menus allows you to have privileges inherited by all of the menu items from the component. If you do not want menu items to inherit privileges from the component, you can specify privileges individually for each menu item. Subitems will inherit the privileges of their parent items. At runtime, users who do not have privileges on items will see the menu without those items. Alignment of menus You can use any alignment (center, left, or right) for application menus in portlet or full-page mode. Enhanced calendar component The calendar component has the following enhancements: You can specify the start and end dates within the Display Options of the Calendar Wizard and at runtime on the parameter form. You can specify whether to display empty months (where no events are occurring). You can specify URL links for any empty date cell. Styles for Portlet Show Mode For application components, you can set the font, size, and color to be used when displaying in a portlet. This feature makes it easier to enhance the display of your application within a portlet. Portlet spacing You can now specify the spacing between portlets in a region, and the spacing between the portlets and the boundaries of the region. This feature gives you much finer control over the appearance of your pages. Page style caching Portal page styles can now also be cached in the same manner as Portal page metadata and page content on the middle tier. Portal Page Styles can be cached using either time-based or validation-based caching. Caching options can be specified on the first page of the Page Style Wizard. Portlet header style enhancements In portlet headers, you can now specify either round and/or square corners on the left, right, or both edges. Borders on tabbed areas To enhance browser display performance in the Netscape browser, the border around a tabbed area has been removed.

Upgrading from previous releases
To facilitate moving to Release 3.0 from previous versions of Oracle Portal (previously known as WebDB), upgrade scripts will be provided on the Oracle Technology Network along with documentation on how to use them.

In-place rendering of URLs in content areas
| When using an 8.1.6 version of the database on Windows NT, if you specify either of the following options, a database crash can occur: the Link That Displays Item In Folder Area option for URL items the Display Folder In Content Area Page option for a URL folder in a content area This problem is fixed in 8.1.7 and 8.1.6.2 of the database.

Document name restrictions
The following restrictions apply to the names of documents that you are uploading into the repository: Filenames must be 80 characters or less. Filenames must not include any of these characters: \ / : * ? < > | " % # + Filenames can include spaces and any of these characters: ! @ ~ & . $ ^ ( ) - _ ` ' [ ] { } ; =

Portal Development Kit
The following are the known limitations for the Portal Development Kit: If the cookies set by a Web provider have an implicit scope defined, it is ignored by Oracle Portal. The communication between Oracle Portal and the Web provider is not encrypted. When you are building a portlet, it is important to remember that, when added to a page, your portlet will be inside of an HTML table. Thus, if you create a portlet with deeply nested tables, it can create performance problems because, when the portlet is added to a page, it adds an additional level of nesting to your tables. The Portal Development Kit is updated regularly and can be downloaded from the Oracle Technology Network.

Distributed provider support
Distributed providers support for providers created using the Application Builder is not available in this release.

Import/Export with security information
When exporting and importing applications, pages, and content areas, you can also export and import the associated page and security information (username, password, access control list). This functionality is useful for preserving the security privileges and page(s) during the export and import process. When running the appropriate Oracle Portal export or import script, you can apply the -security and/or -page switches. For example, on Solaris you can run the scripts as follows:
Script | Example
Application import | appimp.csh -s portal30 -p portal30 -t SCOTT -a EXAMPLE_APP -security
Page export | pageexp.csh -s portal30 -p portal30 -n HOMEPAGE -security
Page import | pageimp.csh -s portal30 -p portal30 -o portal30 -c orcl -security
Content Area export | contexp.csh -s portal30 -p portal30 -a SAMPLECONTENTAREA -security -page
Content Area import | contimp.csh -s portal30 -p portal30 -o portal30 -m reuse -security -page
where -s <portal_schema> -p <portal_password> -n <page_name> -d <dump_file_name> -a <application_name> <-security > -c <connect_string> Notes: For Windows NT, replace the .csh extension with or without the .cmd extension. For example, run the application import script as follows: appimp.cmd -s portal30 -p portal30 -t SCOTT -a EXAMPLE_APP -security The dump files created by using the -security or -page options of the export-import scripts are given the default name. For other script files, you can specify any name for the dump file. See also: For complete information, see "Exporting and importing in Oracle Portal" Help topic in the Oracle Portal Online Help Content Area.

Forms limitations
The following are known limitations for forms applications: The use of database links is only certified for Oracle 8i databases. You may experience unexpected behavior if you use database links to databases other than Oracle 8i (e.g., Oracle 7.3) User defined object types are not supported at this time. The following is a list of datatypes and their support status:
Datatypes | Supported
BLOB | Yes
CHAR | Yes
CLOB | No
DATE | Yes
LONG | No
LONG RAW | No
MLSLABEL | No
NCHAR | No
NCLOB | No
NUMBER | Yes
NVARCHAR | No
NVARCHAR2 | No
RAW | No
ROWID | No
UNDEFINED | No
VARCHAR | Yes
VARCHAR2 | Yes
The following is a list of interMedia object types and their support status:
Object type | Support status
ORDIMAGE | Yes
ORDAUDIO | No
ORDVIDEO | No
Custom object types | No
The maximum number of items (columns in a table or view plus buttons and other elements) on which a form can be based is 200. Forms built on tables/views and master/detail forms can be created only on tables/views across public database links. Private database links are not supported. The file upload feature is not supported across database links. It is also not supported in forms that are based upon stored procedures. A form cannot be based on a view that has any of the following: the DISTINCT operator aggregate functions like AVG, COUNT, MAX, or MIN GROUP BY, HAVING, START WITH, or CONNECT BY clauses For more information on updatable views, refer to the Oracle8i documentation. If you select the Insertable and Updatable options for every item property on a form that is based upon a table/view or master/detail form, an error will result. To work around this issue, you should have at least one field on your form that does not have Insertable and Updatable selected. Refer to bug number 1403084 for more details.

Recent objects portlet
The image for tables in the recent objects portlet is missing. Users can copy table.gif to rtable.gif in their image directory to fix the problem.

Charts
The Image Enhanced Charting feature is Beta in this release. To enable it, click the Administer tab on the Portal Home page and click Global Settings. On the Global Settings page, check Image Charts From Query Wizard.

Center alignment of tabs
Center alignment of tabs within a page region is not supported for this release.

National Language Support
The character set setting that you use on your middle tier should be identical to the character set setting of your database. If you are using the UTF8 character set for your database, it is recommended that you use Microsoft Internet Explorer as your browser. If you are using Oracle Portal to develop forms against a multibyte character set database with multibyte object names, it is recommended that you use Netscape Navigator as your browser. If the language you are using for Oracle Portal is a different language from the one of your content, then you will experience problems performing a basic search, i.e., items matching the search criteria will not be found. This can be particularly problematic if you have multi-lingual content and will be addressed in a future release. The Oracle Portal Welcome page is currently appearing in English only.

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