WCI Updates in Oracle Metalink

I’ve been asked several times, how to search and download patches and updates for the WCI portal. The support for WCI is very healthy and gives a lot of optimizations/updates you can install. Using the new Metalink interface is very easy to do, let’s start:

• First thing you have to do, login into the Metalink (Oracle Support) portal using your customer account.
• Inside the Metalink portal click on the Patches & Updates

• On the right side you do have now a several options to search for :

• Because we want to search for specific product, click on the link Product or Family (Advanced Search). The application will change the searchable options with the following screen:

• In field Product type the name of the product, for example “Interactions”. You will get a list with suggestions, from which you can select the product you want. From the Release drop-down, select the version for which you look for updates. Next you can select the platform you run your portal application, like shown on the screen bellow:

• Click now on search and you will get a screen with all available updates.  

Connect to the ALI LDAP Directory Service

Starting with version 6.5 from the ALUI Portal now WebCenter Interaction the development team released a new service calls ALI LDAP Directory. This is a completely LDAP service which allows you to connect external applications more easier. If you get for example Ldapbrowser tool which you can download for free on the the this link, you can test how it works. To connect to the ALI LDAP Service you need the following information:

Host: the machine on which ALI LDAP has been installed
Base: ou=users,dc=bea,dc=com - this is the base where all groups and users are stored
User DN: uid=administrator,ou=users,dc=bea,dc=com

For 'uid' I used administrator, but you can use another account from the portal. Knowing this you can for example implement authentication from external application against the portal, which are not working in portal context!

cheers

WebCenter Interaction 10g Upgrate, could not find the Add a User-Agent String?!

In the WebLogic Interaction 10g version there is a new feature added to the experience rules manager, which allows you to add your own user agent variable, so you can switch your experience definition based on value in some of the http variables.

If you update your current portal version to 10g version maybe you will start to wonder, why you can see this button there in the rules manager. This is because you have to add it manually. This is working on the following why.

Go to the your portal install home, normally this is the Drive:\bea\alui or Drive:\oracle\alui and then go to the settings\portal\dynamicloads\Plugins folder and open the file ConditionTypes.xml. Add the following line to the file:

class name="com.plumtree.portalpages.condition.conditiontypes.ConditionTypeUserAgent"


Save the file and restart the portal. Now go to you Portal Administration and open one of the rules you created and you have to be able to see the button "Add a User-Agent String"

cheers,