Chapter 11: Integrating Forms, Reports, and Discoverer into Portal

Overview

Back in 10, we explored the OracleAS Portal environment and saw how its wizards make the development of OracleAS Portal Forms, Reports, and other various OracleAS Portal components a relatively simple task. Combined with OracleAS Portal s robust security, seamless integration with Single Sign-on and the LDAP-based Oracle Internet Directory, and ease with which OracleAS Portal applications can be deployed, OracleAS Portal is an extremely appealing environment for developers.

While OracleAS Portal is an exciting development environment, chances are your organization has existing Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Discoverer Workbooks and Worksheets being used in production. For most organizations, it is not practical to discard all of their existing applications and begin coding OracleAS Portal Forms and Reports from scratch. Thankfully, Oracle provides a mechanism to ease your transition into OracleAS Portal development by facilitating the integration of existing Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Discoverer Workbooks and Worksheets into OracleAS Portal. Developers can achieve the benefits inherent to OracleAS Portal, namely, its robust security and its ease of visual consistency, while moving existing applications to the Web with relative ease.

Note  

It is also important to note that the forms and reports components of OracleAS Portal have a much smaller feature set and do not have all of the functionality of the Oracle Forms, Reports, and Discoverer products. Therefore, OracleAS Portal may not be the best choice as an exclusive tool to rewrite existing production applications in.

Is OracleAS Portal required to move existing Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Discoverer Workbooks and Worksheets to the Web? No; it is entirely possible to move those components to the Web outside of OracleAS Portal ”Chapter 6 discusses those methods in detail. This chapter discusses the integration of existing Oracle Forms, Oracle Reports, and Oracle Discoverer Workbooks and Worksheets into web pages that are served up by the OracleAS Portal engine in Oracle Application Server 10 g . We will discuss the various methods for incorporating these components into OracleAS Portal, the pieces that need to be in place before attempting to integrate these components (like creation and administration of Discoverer connections), and the various methods of security we can apply to these components.

This chapter discusses the following topics:

• Benefits of integration

• Native support

• Integration of Oracle Reports

• Integration of Oracle Forms

• Integration of Oracle Discoverer Workbooks and Worksheets