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Tuesday, January 15, 2008

external application in webcenter 11g

In Webcenter you can already use the pdk webclipper portlet to include some external web content in your own portal, but now you can also use external content in your portal page where you have to provide credentials like your corporate webmail or an external site with a corporate login account. This is called external application.
Oracle creates for this an own credential store where it store your credentials and Oracle also provides a taskflow to manage these accounts. Too bad in TP3 you can configure it and run it in Webcenter but you can't login somehow. It looks very promising. But how can you use it in webcenter 11g? First we select the viewcontroller and right click -> New. Now we can select external application item under the General Category. Let's use otn forums as example.

Now we have to look at the page source of the otn login page to find the login url and the type of action. The next step is to find the name of the login and the password field. If you at the page source of the login page. We see that the action = https://login.oracle.com/sso/auth and the method is post etc.

Now we can add the hidden fields to the external application. With the otn site we have v,site2pstoretoken and locale as additional fields.

The next step is shared credentials for logged in user. If you leave this empty every user have to provide its own credentials and the last step is the public credentials for not authenticated users. With shared and public credentials you don't have to log in, you see the external direct. Now we have to create a new pdk java producer

We have to provide an url endpoint use http://localhost:6688/jpdk/providers/external and select associate producer with external applicatin and select otn.

In the application resourcez we can see now the otnForums producer with the flight portlet.

Now we can drag the flight portlet to the jsf page. Make sure you add security to the project and to the page. The last step is to add the extapp-change-password-taskflow from the webcenter resource view to the jsf page so we can change passwords for these external applications and with this taskflow you can use the personal credential store. We can run now the jsf portal page

3 comments:

  1. Hi,
    I am following your steps for adding a new External Application but at the end of the Oracle PDK Java Producer process, the Log Oc4J tell me:
    found existingProviderInstance for ProviderID: 12057799005421
    and it doesn't create the connection...
    Can you help me?

    algoritmo7@gmail.com

    Thank you

    ReplyDelete
  2. Strange , maybe you can make sure you have english settings and start jdev in single user jdev.exe -singleuser

    ReplyDelete
  3. Thanks for this tutorial, I'm looking for other resources for portlet creation via JDeveloper 11g. I'm trying to build a Groupwise connector portlet. When I place the extapp-change-password object on the jsf page it doesn't register the app instance I've created and placed with the "flight portlet". I'm un-clear about setting up security "on the project and the page". Also any other resources you may have for current portlet creation would be great. I've poured through the otn stuff but have found some gaps. Again, Thank you for any assistance you can give.

    ReplyDelete