Oracle9iAS Portal Developer Kit
Understanding Provider Groups

This article describes what provider groups are, how to use them as a Portal Administrator and how to define them. It is assumed that the reader is familiar with the concept of Web providers.
A provider group is a logical collection of Web providers which is defined by a remote provider groups service. A Portal Administrator can register provider groups for use with their portal. Once registered, a provider group simplifies the process of registering the providers in the group. This allows organizations that create Web providers to publish registration details of their providers and facilitate automatic registration with any Oracle9iAS Portal. The only information must be given to the Portal Administrator is the name and location of the provider group.

Information which is common to all registered instances of a Web provider, such as its session management requirements, is stored centrally with the definition of the provider group. Previously, this information needed to be manually communicated to individual Portal Administrators on a per provider basis.
Oracle Portal communicates with provider group services using SOAP over HTTP. Typically, organizations that wish to expose details of their providers in a provider group will use the default implementation of the provider groups service that is supplied with Oracle9iAS Portal. This default implementation uses an XML file that contains registration metadata for each provider in one or more named groups of providers. However, it is also possible for users wishing to create a new type of provider groups service to write their own Java class as a replacement for the default implementation.

The XML file that drives the default implementation can be written by hand or created using Provider User Interface functionality of Oracle Portal which is accessible via the Navigator.

REGISTERING AND USING PROVIDER GROUPS WITH PORTAL

The Oracle9iAS Portal user interface allows the Portal Administrator to register provider groups with their Portal. The registration functionality is accessed via the Provider Groups portlet which can be found on the Build tab in Oracle9iAS Portal or via the Navigator. To register a provider group you must enter the URL of the provider groups service and the name of the group. You can obtain these values from the provider groups service administrator.
Once a provider group is registered with Portal, you can browse the providers in the group via the Providers tab on the Oracle Portal Navigator. From here, you can also register providers that are part of a provider group with Oracle Portal. If you click the register link next to a provider in a provider group, Portal obtains registration metadata for the provider from the provider groups service. The provider is then automatically registered for use with Portal. Following registration, you are presented with the Edit Provider wizard which allows you to tailor the provider registration properties to their own requirements.
You can also edit and de-register registered provider groups via either the Oracle Portal Navigator or the Provider Groups portlet.
To register provider groups and perform related tasks programmatically, use the PL/SQL APIs available in the package wwpro_api_progrp_registry. For more information refer to the PL/SQL API Reference provided with the Oracle9iAS Portal Developer Kit.

DEFINING PROVIDER GROUPS

The server side component of the provider groups framework is implemented as an Oracle SOAP service. The service can be configured to use any Java class that implements a supplied interface. This allows users to define their own sources for provider registration metadata such as an XML file (as in the case of the default implementation) or the provider registry of an Oracle Portal.
Typically, users wishing to define provider groups will make use of the default implementation. As mentioned above, this implementation obtains details of providers from an XML file. This file includes all registration metadata for each provider in the group including translations for display names and timeout messages. It is possible to configure the service implementation class using properties passed via the Oracle SOAP service descriptor. In the case of the default implementation the location of the XML file is specified using this method.
The Oracle SOAP service deployment descriptor for the default provider groups implementation, and a deployment descriptor for the custom provider required by the service to allow its configuration to be customized, are packaged in the file pdkjava.jar. These deployment descriptor files should be used to deploy the custom provider and service in the usual way. Note that all the server side provider groups classes are packaged in pdkjava.jar. Therefore, it should be ensured that this archive is in Oracle SOAP's classpath prior to deployment of the provider groups service.
To avoid naming clashes, it is recommended that the name of the organization is used to construct the names of provider groups in a similar way to Java packages, e.g. oracle.apps.providers. This recommendation applies regardless of whether the default or custom implementation of the provider groups service is used.

SUMMARY

Provider groups allow Web providers to be placed into logical groups and these groups are accessible to Oracle Portal. Once registered with Portal, a provider group facilitates simplified registration of the providers it contains. The component that implements provider groups services is extensible in the sense that it allows for the implementation of custom provider group services by implementing a supplied Java interface.

Revision History:

- December, 2001