Some Useful Question For WebSphere Portal
1.What is portal?
Portal is nothing but
a web/J2EE application installed on an application server. Portal provides
content aggregation, personalization, authorization and authentication
2.What are portlets?
Portlets are
applications managed by portal container which generate fragment of portal page
rather than complete page as generated by servlet.
3. Differences between
a portlet and servlet?
·
Portlets generate only
fragment of the portal page rather than entire page
·
Portlets have more
refined request cycle than servlet
·
Portlets have
predefined modes and window states
·
Portlets are can be
only invoked using portlet URLs
4.What are different
phases of portlet life cycle?
Portlet life cycle has
following phases
·
Initialization(init
method)
·
Process action
·
Process event
·
Resource serving
·
Render
·
Destroy
5.Different Portlet
URLs and their use?
There are three types
of portlet URLs
·
Action URL- used for
submitting forms
·
Render URL- used
for links
·
Resource URL – used
for ajax calls and serving documents (pdf files).
6. Difference between
JSR 168 and JSR 286 specifications?
The major changes in
JSR 286 are events, public render parameters, resource serving and portlet
filter.
7.How is the inter
portlet communication carried out in JSR 168 portlet?
The inter portlet
communication for JSR 168 in websphere portal can be done using dyna cache or
shared library. We can create a hash map or any data structure, where we can
store an object that need to be transported with unique key and retrieve it
from the receiving portlet
8. Can you create a DB
connection in render phase? Explain reason?
Yes we can create DB
connection in render phase of portlet. But it is not suggested to create one in
render phase because it will called every time any other portlet on the page is
changed and may result in stale DB connections.
9.What are different
modes supported by JSR 286?
Different modes
supported by JSR 286 are view, edit and help. A portlet should define its
supported mode is portlet.xml file.
10. What are different
States supported by JSR 286?
Different
portlet states supported are normal, maximized and minimized.
11. What are public render
parameters?
Public render
parameters are used to share the information(mostly a string) between different
portlets.
12. How can we transport objects
using public render parameters?
Public render
parameters are typically used to just share the parameters between portlets.
But we can work around by creating a map in the shared library and use the key
as public render parameters and store objects correspondingly.
13. What is Web DAV? What are
theme components stored in it ?
Web DAV (web based
distributed authoring and versioning) is nothing but a extra set of methods
using HTTP for managing documents. In WebSphere portal all the static
components of the theme are stored in Web DAV. This is one of the options of
storing the theme. We can also load theme as .war file.
14. What are different entry
points to Web DAV?
The three different
entry points to web DAV are
http://<server name>:<port>/wps/mycontenthandler/dav/fs-type1
http://<server name>:<port>/wps/mycontenthandler/dav/themelist
15. What are Credential Vaults?
In WebSphere portal,
credential vault is the repository to store the user id and password. We can
use credential vault service API to store and retrieve them programmatically.
16.What are different types of
credential vault segments?
Vault segment is the
partition of the vault. There are two types of segments
Administration managed
User managed
17.Different types of slots?
Private slot- private-
only one portlet instance
Shared slot- shared-
any of the users portlets
Administrator
slot-private-any of the users portlets
System slot- shared-
all users and all portlets
18.What are virtual portals?
Virtual portal is same
as base portal which can run on same JVM. We can have as many as 150 virtual
portals in single installation. It will be separate in all respects but share
the same system resource of the server.
19.What is Dynacache?
Dynacache is disturbed
map used to store and retrieve objects from memory. IBM provides API to create,
store retrieve the objects.
20. What is CSA?
Client-side
aggregation (CSA) is a new method of rendering a WebSphere Portal page that
moves the rendering workload from the server to the client. It is made possible
by the Representational State Transfer (REST) services introduced in WebSphere
Portal 6.1.
In the traditional
server-side aggregation (SSA) rendering, the page and each of the portlets is
completely rendered on the server, using JSPs, and returned to the client in
one big response. In contrast, in CSA, we request only the pieces of
information from the server that are required to update the page as a result of
the user’s interactions with the page.
For example, if a page
contains four portlets and the user clicks a link in one of the portlets, only
that portlet is updated. This means the server must render only one portlet,
instead of four portlets plus the theme for an
interaction with a single portlet.
The REST services also
take greater advantage of caching. Since each individual artifact can be
independently cache-able, the client ends up retrieving a greater number of
responses directly out of cache, further reducing the server workload.
21.What are different modes
available in Websphere Portal?
A part for standard
modes ( view, edit, help) it provides edit_ defaults and configure mode.
22. What can you do with XML
access scripts?
Xml access is command
line utility used for exporting and importing portal configurations. . It can
be used for backing up the configuration of certain environments, for loading
new configurations (for new portlets or pages, for example), or for updating existing
portlets when a new WAR file is provided by development. There are few samples
C:\IBM\WebSphere\PortalServer\doc\xml-sample
23.What is model spi and what is
it used for?
Web sphere uses
different model for providing content aggregation and navigation
The available models
are
Content model,
navigation model , navigation selection model and layout model.
These models are
provided using model spi.
24.What is Navigation model? How
to navigate through the pages using navigation model? What is the main package
which is used for model spi?
Navigation model is
used to get topology of the navigation available to a user.
25.How did you solve problems
related to themes and skins?
We can debug theme and
skin problems by client side logging and using firebug for javascript problems
Hope you are liking
this series, Please do leave you comments below. Stayed tuned for more, there
are lot questions coming your way.
26.What is Web Content
Management System (WCMS)?
Web Content management
system is a software system that helps build and manage a Web entities (html
pages, documents etc.) Once setup is complete it provides templates for
authoring, workflow management to the content. It is easy to use for non
technical user.
27.What is syndication?Syndication, (Web syndication in particular)
is a ability to provide users updates of the content from the site. The most
popular formats of web syndication are RSS and ATOM feeds.
28. What is local rendering and
remote rendering?
The web content
management portlets can be rendered local or remotely. A local rendering
portlet displays content on the same portal as the instance where the web
content manager is installed. A remote rendering portlet displays Web content
on a different portal server than the instance where Web Content Manager is
installed.
29. What are different steps in
creating content for WebSphere portal WCM ?
The following are
different steps involved in creating the content for the WebSphere portal WCM
1.
Create Library
2.
Create Workflow
3.
Create Site area (Sites
are removed in WebSphere Portal 7.0)
4.
Create Authoring
templates
5.
Create Presentation
templates
6.
Map authoring and
presentation templates
30.What are work flows?
A workflow is a
sequence of steps that are followed in creating approved content. In WebSphere
portal, A workflow contains one or more stages. Every stage contains one or
more actions, the following are different Workflow actions available in
WebSphere Publish, Expire, Email, Scheduled Move, Custom Actions.
31. What are Authoring and
Presentation Templates?
Authoring Template- This template is defined using authoring
portlet, where we define the access information, form properties and
default content. It does not contain any information for presentation and The
elements in this form are linked to presentation template.
Presentation Template- This allow to change the look of a page
without having to update what is being displayed on a page. It will allow to define
Page style, Page layout and map element to the authoring templates.
32. What is the difference
between personalization and customization ?
Personalization- It means to serve the
user or consumer with user specific data depending on his interests collected
over a time. A real world example would be google serving ads basing on the
recent search you made.
Customization- It is ability provided to the user to
change the layout, styling of the page and save it.
Different ways to deploy a portlet using RAD and WebSphere portal 7
During development there are situations where we need to know multiple ways to deploy. This will be very helpful when you want to check whether the problem is due to portlet code rather than deployment method (In case of corrupt RAD). we may need to deploy the portlet in upper environments where any development tool is not available. As far as now we know four different ways to deploy a portlet
1. The old school way (through WAS admin console)
The first and probably the most generic way of deploying any application is through WAS admin console.
· Log to WAS administration console
· Navigate to Application –> New Application –> New Enterprise Application
· Select an EAR, WAR or JAR file either from the local or remote file system
· Choose “Fast path” and click next
· Leave everything as is in “select installation options” and click next
· Select the deploy server from “Clusters and servers” for portal select the one ending in websphere_portal(standalone installation)
· Select the module you want to deploy and click apply
· Enter the context root for the application and click next
· Check the summary and click finish
· it will display the “deploy successful” message and click “save”
Now, Modify the DeployPortlet.xml located at C:\IBM\WebSphere\PortalServer\doc\xml-samples to the portlet you need and then run it through “Portal Admin UI”
Administration –> Portal Settings –> import xml
This will install the portlet successfully and male available to a page. You can use the same way for installing theme as WAR and then run the DeployTheme.xml.
2. Using Portlet Admin UI
We can deploy portlets in WAR module through the Portal Admin UI.
Administration –> Portlet management –> Web Modules
Click the “Install” and select the WAR file from the local drive and click next. This will install the portlet makes it available to portal. we need to add it to the required page. In this way, portal in background generates a xml and runs it for you.
3. Using RAD, deploy portlet option
The most easy and simplest way of deploying a portlet is through Deploy portlet option in the RAD. When we create a portlet project in the RAD, when you right click you will see a option “Deploy Portlet”. By Selecting it RAD will generate a xml script for portlet and deploys it on the server configured in the RAD.
4. Using RAD, RUN AS
The last option, no the cleanest way to do deployment is through “Run As” option in RAD. By right clicking the project select
Run As –> Run on server will install the portlet on the portal home under “Rational Components” page. This way it will create multiple sub pages under this page for each portlet.
Reduce Startup time for WebSphere portal
Did
you ever felt frustrating about startup and reboot time during WebSphere portal
development? Almost every one who has experience working(developing) with
WebSphere products might have seen this reverse snowball effect. The more WAR
and EAR files it takes, more slower it becomes. On an average it takes 2- 6mins
to startup. Lets try reduce it now.
Here
we list few ways to reduce startup time for the portal. No guarantee that these
will reduce time drastically but worth a try. So try them and leave your responses
below which will be useful to others.
Enable
Development Mode
Go to Administration
Console –> Application Servers –> WebSphere_Portal
and
check the development mode. For more detailed instructions check this article. Make sure you have the generic JVM
arguments set properly. The two generic JVM arguments that need to present are
–Xverify and –Xquickstart. For setting the generic JVM
arguments please check the Info Center.
we
can also enable Start components as needed and see if it makes
any difference. It is located below the development mode enable option.
Uninstall
Default portlets
we
can remove the default portlets with causing minimum impact to the portal
system. we can remove all the administration portlets and run everything
through XML access. But this is not advisable for the beginners. For more
details about the uninstalling the portlets check this article.
we
can also remove the unnecessary portlets from serverindex.xml Which
is located at
C:\IBM\WebSphere\wp_profile\config\cells\node1\nodes\node1\serverindex.xml
Increase
the initial Heap size
we
can increase the initial heap size to match the default. we can set the initial
heap size by navigating to
Administration
console –> Servers –> Server Types –> WebSphere Application Servers
–> WebSphere Portal-> Process Definition-> Java Virtual Machine and
set the initial heap size and restart the server.
Hoping
above mentioned ways will save you some time.
Useful
Links
1. Check the administration
console help.
LTPA Token Vs LTPA Token 2
Light
weight third party authentication token is used to enable communication between
multiple WebSphere servers on behalf of the authentication users, in simple
words allows enabling Single Sign On (SSO).
Until
up to WebSphere version 5.1 used “LTPA token”(version 1). From next versions of
WebSphere maintains backward compatibility and can generate both versions of
LTPA token. You can follow the steps mentioned in the Info Center. These steps and options available
slightly change for different installations. Please check the info center for
more information. When we want to strictly restrict ourself to “LTPA Token 2” ,
we need to set the values in the CSEnvironment.properties file.
This file is located in local installation at
C:\IBM\WebSphere\wp_profile\PortalServer\config\config
or
Check corresponding installation folders. For further details please check
this article.
If
you want know more about LTPA token and retrieving them from portlet, Please
check our previous article here.
LTPA token and accessing from portlet
LTPA
token (Light weight Third Party Authentication)
To
keep it simple, In WebSphere world LTPA token is used to give
authenticated users access to all the servers in the same domain automatically.
· a cookie is sent to client
(browser) upon authentication, which contain LTPA token
· all others servers extract it
from cookie and use it for authentication
· cookie is valid for one
browsing session
· LTPA token is nothing more
than a encrypted format of the authenticated user details
Enabling
LTPA token
LTPA
authentication can configured from WebSphere admin console. IBM has clearly
defined steps to enable LTPA token. It will be repetitive if we write them here
for details please look here (Enabling LTPA token)
Reading
LTPA token from portlet
The
portlet API provides a method getCookies() to retrieve the cookies in
the portlet. The following code snippet is useful for getting LTPA token in
portlet
private
String getLtpaToken(PortletRequest request){
Cookie cookie = request.getCookie();
for(Cookie element : cookie){
System.out.println(“Cookie Name” + element.getName());
if( element.getName().contains(“LtpaToken”))
return element.getValue();
}
return
“LTPA token not found”;
}
If
you want to retrieve LTPA token using the WebSphere security API please check
here (How to read the LTPA Token using API).
The
reason we are checking for the cookie name containing “LtpaToken” rather than
exact name is because it may varied across different version. For WebSphere
portal is “LtpaToken2”. We hope this article was useful to you. Keep watching…
How to create virtual portal ?
Virtual
portal
WebSphere
portal gives us ability to create multiple portals with single
installation. Virtual portal is same as base portal which can run on same
JVM. We can have as many as 150 virtual portals in single installation. It will
be separate in all respects but share the same system resources of the server.
We can create shared or scoped resources for virtual portals.
Creating
a virtual portal
The
following are the steps for creating the virtual portal, the steps are pretty
straight forward
1.
Logon to Portal administration console
2.
Navigate to Virtual Portals –> Mange Virtual Portals
3.
Click New Virtual portal and fill out the following information
Virtual
portal title:
Shan ecommerce portal
Virtual
portal description:
Ecommerce website
URL
Context :
shan
Virtual
portal hostname :
If you some specific hostname enter it or leave it blank for default
User
realm:
Leave it default or choose specific one you need
Initial
admin user group:
Click search button besides it and click search on the next screen
and
select one you need or select the default one.
Default
theme: Select
the default or leave it to page builder
and
click OK
4.
You will see a screen saying “Creating virtual portal” and virtual portal in
now created
5.
Click the portal created “Shan portal”. you will see the the URL now changed
with context we mentioned before
Here
we go, you now have created the virtual portal. we have some more articles
related to creating and managing the virtual portal resources. Keep
watching.
Did
you ever wonder how can we change the default portal URL? It always better to
hide your underlying implementation technology for any web application. Most
enterprises do it and some odd one leaves it out. For security purposes, it
always good to hide it. There is little bit of work involved in changing it but
worth your enterprise time to get cleaner look in their URL’s
This
might be administrative related task, but it always helps to know there is an
option to change the portal default URL. Here we will summarize the steps
involved, for further details please check out the links below.
1. By
default, all the apps are installed under /wps/portal. we need to make a copy
of the installed apps and use it for redeployment after the URL change. The
installed apps are located at
C:\IBM\WebSphere\wp_profile\installedApps\node1
2.
Open wkplc.properties
C:\IBM\WebSphere\wp_profile\ConfigEngine\properties
search
for the “WpsContextRoot” change default “wps” to desired and save it.
3.
Open wkplc _comp.properties located in same directory and
change “WpsDefaultHome” and “WpsPersonalizedHome” to desired.
4.
For windows, open command prompt and run
ConfigEngine.bat
modify-servlet-path –DPortalAdminPwd=password – DWasPassword=password
5.Restart
the server and we are good to go
Check
out the link for the detailed instructions.
Page Builder 2–Architecture
What
is Page Builder 2 theme ?
Over
the time ,WebSphere portal has designed different themes namely, Portal,
PortalWeb 2 and Page Bulider themes. Page Builder 2 theme is the second
iteration after its inception in WebSphere portal 6.1.5.
· Page builder themes provides
both server side and client side aggregation.
· It makes use of latest web
technologies like HTML 5 and CSS 3.
· It provides in-page
administrative tasks like creation of pages, adding tags, adding portlets to
pages and changing styles and skins instead of using administrative portlets
from the administrative pane.
· Uses WebDAV to store static
files of theme.
Process
Flow
The
following is the process flow of the Page builder 2 theme describing different
files involved in the process. The few important components which builds the
theme are
· Default.jsp
· bootstrap.jspf
· bootstrapPortal.jspf
· Theme.html
· Dynamic content spot mappings
Default.jsp
File
Location:C:\IBM\WebSphere\PortalServer\theme\wp.mashup.cc.theme\installedApps\wp.mashup.cc.theme.ear\PageBuilder2.war\themes\html\Default.jsp
Default.jsp
is the starting point for the page builder theme. The three main functions of
this page are
· Initialize values using jspf
files
· Determine the theme template
· Forward control to render tag
for final markup.
The
following is the code snippet from Default.jsp highlighting its
functionalities.
This
jsp page includes the jsp fragments (.jspf) which complies into a servlet. The
two jspf files included in the page are
· bootstrap.jspf
· bootstrapPortal.jspf
These
files are used to initialize the values for the theme, bootstrap.jspf is
used to initialize the context and set different URI components. bootstrapPortal.jspf is
used to set different variables like portalRoot, isUserLoggedIn, isPageRenderModeCSA
and many others. For full list of the variables look into the files (file
location mentioned above).
Once
the values are initialized, the next important thing it does is to determine
the template for the theme. By default in absence of any template it will point
to the template in WEB DAV. If nothing is changed it will be set the themeTemplateURI to
theme.html
Then
control is passed to <r:datasource> where it takes the themeTemplateURI and
mine type. It is responsible to parse and resolve all the dynamic content
spots.
Theme.html
By
default all the static files are stored in the WEB DAV for portal 7. We need to
connect and get those for doing any modifications or looking at it. Luckily we
have a copy of theme.html stored in JCRFileStore in local (we are not sure
whether the changes made to these files is equivalent to the changes made to
WEB DAV files, But both appears to be same).
File
Location: C:\IBM\WebSphere\wp_profile\temp\node1\WebSphere_Portal\JCRFileStore\filestore\fs-type1\themes\PageBuilder2\theme.html
(Do
not make any changes to files in JCRFileStore, these are only for only
debugging purposes)
Theme.html
contains the Dynamic Content Spot mappings for different of the page. The
following are few of them.
· Banner Navigation
· Search
· Banner common actions
· Tab navigation
· Page Toolbar
· Layout
The
following figure highlights different features of the theme
And
many others related to ASA (active server analytics), for further details
check ASA.
Every
Dynamic content spot has relation as “dynamic Content” in its tag.
We
can find the all the defined dynamic content spots in portal administration
console under
Resources
-> Resource environment -> Resource Environment providers ->
WP_DynamicContentSpotMappings -> Custom properties.
These
dynamic content spot will aggregate to generate the complete html for the
theme. The following diagram consolidates the theme process flow.
Site Analytics – Options in websphere in portal 7
Every
website irrespective of whether it is a portal or simple few pages site needs
to know what pages the customer is hitting the most ? Does he is getting info
he searching easily? On which pages does server failed? To answer all these
questions we need site analytics options in websphere. For further details
please look into references provided.
The
two options available in the websphere portal 7 are server side analytics and
Active site analytics
Server
side site analytics
Server
side analytics properly configured (link),
will log the details to the log file. Typically it is called sa.log located at
“C:\IBM\WebSphere7\wp_profile\logs|Websphere_Portal”. we can set the parameters
to create back up files at regular intervals, like few minutes, hours or days
basing the traffic to this site. we can then use a log file analyzer like
“AWStats” to read those files and generate visual graphs and tables.
we
can measure several parameters like Users browsers, User details, search engine
key words, page URLs and many others.
Active
site analytics
Active
site analytics works more like any other third party web analytics software
based on java script injection. Websphere provides support for
integration with Webtrends, Ominiture and core meterics. To make the data
available to third party software, we need to add the detailed tags to
theme or skin, like asa.page.title and add a aggregator to the page. The
following diagram summarizes the workflow of ASA, ASA is preferred over SSA
No comments:
Post a Comment