Register or Edit External Application Wizard - General Page

Use to capture the general login information required to authenticate to the external application.

External Applications and Credential Provisioning in Oracle WebCenter Portal provide a means of accessing content from applications that require user authentication. External applications can be used with WebCenter Portal tools and portlet producers. For instance, when an Oracle PDK portlet producer's implementation depends on an application that handles its own authentication, you can associate that producer with an external application definition. At design time, this is a simple matter of registering the external application, then selecting the external application from a list when you register or edit an Oracle PDK portlet producer. At run time, the producer uses the information associated with the external application to authenticate the user to the application, and consequently consume its portlets.

Element Description

Login Details

Enter the external application login details.
  • Login URL

    Enter the URL to which the HTML login form is submitted. You find this URL by viewing the HTML source for the login form of the external application.

  • User Name/ID Field Name

    Enter the term that identifies the user name or the user ID field of the HTML login form, for example, User Name. You find this term in the login form of the external application. This field is not applicable if you select BASIC as the authentication method. However, it is mandatory if the login URL is specified and authentication method is GET or POST.

  • Password Field Name

    Enter the term that identifies the password field of the HTML login form, for example, Password. You find this term in the login form of the external application. This field is not applicable if you select BASIC as the authentication method. However, it is mandatory if the login URL is specified and authentication method is GET or POST.

Authentication Details

Enter the external application authentication details.

Authentication Method

Use the menu to select the form submission method. The method that you select determines how message data is sent by the browser. You find this value by viewing the HTML source for the external application's login form, for example, <form method="POST" action="/security/auth" AutoComplete="off">.

You can select any one of the following methods:

  • GET

    Select to submit the login credentials as part of the login URL. This method presents a page request to a server. Note that the GET authentication method may pose a security risk because the user name and password are exposed in the URL.

  • POST

    Select to submit login credentials within the body of a form. Selected by default.

  • BASIC

    Select to submit login credentials as part of the login URL. Note that the Basic authentication method may pose a security risk because the user name and password are exposed in the URL.

If the exposure of user names and passwords is a concern, consider using a Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol to manage the security of message transmission.

Note that the fields in the Login Details section are optional because the external application need not be Web enabled. However, if the authentication method is defined as POST or GET and a login URL is specified, then it is mandatory to specify the user name and password name fields.


Related Topics

"Managing External Applications" in Administering Oracle WebCenter Portal