OracleAS Portal Developer Kit (PDK)
Installing the Portal Tools

Last Updated: June 23, 2005
Status: Production
Version: PDK Release 2 (10.1.2.0.2 and later)

Contents

Introduction
Contents of pdksoftware.zip
Contents of the portalTools Directory
Contents of the libcommon Directory
Deploying the Portal Tools Application
Manually Deploying to a Stand-Alone OC4J Instance
Configuring and Registering the Providers under Portal Tools
Troubleshooting
Advanced Portal Tools Configurations

Introduction

Note: Starting with PDK 9.0.4.1.0, the PDK download is intended to be installed and deployed in a standalone OC4J instance only. If you plan to use PDK in an Oracle Application Server instance, you must get and install the corresponding Oracle Application Server releases or patchsets.

Portal Tools is a collection of deployable OracleAS Portal tools built on Oracle's PDK-Java technology. By using Portal Tools, OracleAS Portal page designers can easily combine any Web content and publish data from a variety of data sources to a portal page.

This download includes the following Portal Tools:

This document contains installation and configuration information on the Portal Tools, and explains how to:

If you are upgrading from a previous version of Portal Tools, please see the upgrading.portaltools.html article in the portalTools directory. 

Please consult the release notes for up-to-date list of new features, known issues as well as the minimum requirements to deploy the current release of Portal Tools.

Contents of pdksoftware.zip

Portal Tools is part of the OracleAS Portal Developer Kit (PDK). To install it, first unzip the pdksoftware.zip file into a directory located on the same machine where OC4J is installed. (These instructions will from now on refer to this directory as $unzip_directory.) Unzipping pdksoftware.zip to the $unzip_directory creates the following directory structure: 

Contents of portalTools Directory

The portalTools directory is created under $unzip_directory/pdk and contains all the files required by the Portal Tools. The following files are included in this directory:

Contents of the libcommon Directory

The libcommon directory is created under  $unzip_directory/pdk and contains libraries shared by different components contained in pdksoftware.zip.  Some of these libraries may already exist in your OC4J standalone instance installation. If so, you need to selectively copy them into your installation directory by ensuring you only update them if the supplied libraries are newer than your current installation.

Deploying the Portal Tools Application

Copying the Required Files

Before deploying the Portal Tools application, you need to copy all the required library files to the OracleAS installation home.

copy $unzip_directory/pdk/portalTools/lib/jlib/* to $INSTALL_HOME/jlib/
copy $unzip_directory/pdk/portalTools/lib/portal/jlib/* to $INSTALL_HOME/portal/jlib/
copy $unzip_directory/pdk/portalTools/lib/ultrasearch/lib/* to $INSTALL_HOME/ultrasearch/lib/
copy $unzip_directory/pdk/portalTools/lib/wireless/lib/* to $INSTALL_HOME/wireless/lib/
copy $unzip_directory/pdk/portalTools/lib/bibeans/lib/* to $INSTALL_HOME/bibeans/lib/
copy $unzip_directory/pdk/libcommon/portal/jlib/* to $INSTALL_HOME/portal/jlib/
copy $unzip_directory/pdk/libcommon/webcache/jlib/* to $INSTALL_HOME/webcache/jlib/
copy $unzip_directory/pdk/libcommon/jlib/* to $INSTALL_HOME/jlib/

You only need to copy the following configuration files if they do not already exist in the $INSTALL_HOME.

copy $unzip_directory/pdk/portalTools/conf/portal/conf/* to $INSTALL_HOME/portal/conf/

Notes:

Deploying the Application

Manually Deploying to a Standalone OC4J Instance

This section assumes that you already have a standalone OC4J server installed and configured. If you do not have an OC4J installation, please install and configure it according to its installation instructions. 

To deploy the application manually:

  1. Shut down the OC4J instance.
    To shut down OC4J, you can use the following command from $OC4J_HOME/j2ee/home directory:
    java -jar admin.jar ormi://<host>:<port>/ admin <admin_password> -shutdown
  2. Performed the steps in Copying the Required Files.
  3. Copy $unzip_directory/pdk/portalTools/portalTools.ear into your OC4J applications subdirectory. Usually, this directory is $OC4J_HOME/j2ee/home/applications.
  4. Add the following to $OC4J_HOME/j2ee/home/config/server.xml:
    <application name="portalTools" path="../applications/portalTools.ear" auto_start="true"/>
  5. Add the following to your OC4J Web site configuration file. Check the entry "<web-site path=......>" in $OC4J_HOME/j2ee/home/config/server.xml. This specifies the name and location of the Web site configuration file. For example, if it is pointing to "http-web-site.xml" file, you need to add the following entries in your $OC4J_HOME/j2ee/home/config/http-web-site.xml file:
    <web-app application="portalTools" name="portalTools" load-on-startup="true" root="/portalTools" />
    <web-app application="portalTools" name="webClipping" load-on-startup="true" root="/portalTools/webClipping" />
    <web-app application="portalTools" name="omniPortlet" load-on-startup="true" root="/portalTools/omniPortlet" />
    <web-app application="portalTools" name="providerBuilder" load-on-startup="true" root="/portalTools/builder" />
    <web-app application="portalTools" name="sample" load-on-startup="true" root="/portalTools/sample" />
  6. Start up the OC4J instance again by executing the following command from $OC4J_HOME/j2ee/home directory:
    java -jar oc4j.jar

Portal Tools is now deployed. Please proceed to Configuring and Registering.

Configuring and Registering the Providers under Portal Tools

Now that Portal Tools is deployed, you should proceed to configure the individual providers before registering them with an OracleAS Portal instance.  This can be done from the Portal Tools home page at the following URL:

http://<server>:<port>/portalTools

The home page lists the providers under Portal Tools. Click on each link to display the provider's test page and configure the provider.

Troubleshooting

Error you are most likely to encounter and possible solutions for them are listed below.

Advanced Portal Tools Configurations

This section discusses the configurations that need to be performed to accommodate some of these more advanced topics. 

Shutting down Web Cache completely 

This section is only applicable if you installed Portal Tools in an OracleAS installation.  If you want to shut down OracleAS Web Cache completely, you must perform the following steps for Portal Tools to function properly: 

  1. Open the $IAS_HOME/Apache/Apache/conf/httpd.conf file and update the Listen directive to the port on which OracleAS Web Cache was listening.
  2. Restart the Oracle HTTP Server.

For more information, refer to the Shutting down OracleAS Web Cache completely section of the OracleAS Portal Configuration Guide.

Securing the UI Used to Configure the Providers

This section is only applicable if you installed Portal Tools in an OracleAS installation. While configuring a provider, you will come across steps where you need to edit the provider. The UI displayed when you click on the "Edit" link, in default installation, is not secured. This UI can be secured only for OC4J instance deployment in OracleAS. To secure the UI, follow the steps described in the Securing the Edit Provider UI article.

Revision History:
Revision No Last Update
1.0 October 21, 2002
2.0 June 30, 2003
2.1 September 15, 2003
2.2 November 17, 2003
2.4 December 07, 2004
3.0 June 23, 2005

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