Creating Portal Applications

Before creating a portal application, you must make sure that the server domain you're working with is a WebLogic Portal domain or a WebLogic Platform domain to ensure that any necessary supported server resources are created.

Creating the Application

After you configure a Portal-enabled domain, you can create a new portal application in WebLogic Workshop. When a portal application is created, WebLogic supplies all the modules you need for portal development, including a synchronization project . A synchronization project is used for user segments, content selectors, and user profiles.

For more detail on these aspects of synchronization projects, see "Personalizing Portlets," p.246 .

The next step is to add a portal Web project to your application, which provides WebLogic Portal JSP tags and Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) in addition to the WebLogic Portal framework files. After creating a portal Web project, a desktop is ready to be added to the portal. To do this, simply select File, New, Portal from the menu. Figure 12.3 shows the results of following these steps in the Workshop application structure. Notice that by default Workshop creates a Main Page book in which you can add other pages and books. Also, the Header-Footer skeleton is used by default. The "Portal Look and Feel" section, later in this chapter, explains how to work with skeletons and other look and feel components . This might seem like a lot of steps to create a portal application; however, each step builds part of a portal enterprise application.

Figure 12.3. A successful creation of a portal application.

Adding Pages and Books to a Desktop

To add a page to a desktop, drag the Page icon from the Portal UI Controls in the Palette to the book you want to add the page to. Figure 12.4 shows the application's Home page. Other pages have been added to fill in the books. You can apply the properties listed in Table 12.1 to these pages.

Figure 12.4. A desktop with nested books and pages.

Table 12.1. Page Properties

PROPERTY	DESCRIPTION
Title	A required field that names the page and appears on the tab in the browser.
Theme	An optional field that applies a specific look and feel to a page that's different from the rest of the portal.
Definition Label	A required field that uniquely identifies this page from other pages in the application.
Backing File	An optional property that allows specifying a preprocessing class that's executed before the page is rendered.
Unselected Image	An optional property that specifies the URL for an image that's displayed when the page is not selected. If this property isn't specified, text is used.
Selected Image	An optional property that specifies the URL for an image that's displayed when the page is selected. If this property isn't specified, text is used.
Rollover Image	An optional property that specifies the URL for an image that's displayed when the mouse cursor is placed over a page. If this property isn't specified, nothing is shown.
Hidden	An optional property that hides the navigation tab to prevent direct access to a page. The page could be added by using a backing file.
Layout Type	A required property that specifies where portlets can be placed on a page.

To add a book to a desktop, drag the Book icon from the Portal UI Controls in the Palette and place it on another book. Books can be nested in as many levels as you need, but keep in mind that there's a natural limit to what will look good in a browser. Books have the same properties that pages do, except they don't have the Layout Type property. You can also use the three additional properties listed in Table 12.2.

Table 12.2. Additional Book Properties

PROPERTY	DESCRIPTION
Default Page	A required property that selects which page should be displayed by default.
Navigation	A required property that selects which type of menu should be used to display pages.
Editable	An optional property that allows the book to be edited; this property can be used by the WebLogic Portal Visitor Tools to allow users to add pages to a book.

The example in Figure 12.4 shows three levels of nested books: the default Main Page Book, the Games book, and the Poker book.