Oracle Webcenter Portal 11.1.1.6 VirtualBox: Installing Webcenter Portlet Producers

Overview

In order to integrate some existing web site content/functionality into your Webcenter Portal, you'll likely need to have the provided Portlet Producers Omniportlet and Web Clipping portlet installed in your Webcenter virtual machine.  These make integrating with existing sites much easier and quicker than a home-grown solution, but will need to be installed if you're using the Oracle VirtualBox VM that includes Webcenter Portal.

Prerequisites

First, you'll have to download the VirtualBox VM that runs Webcenter Portal from Oracle at http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/middleware/soasuite/learnmore/vmsoa-172279.html.

Second, you should have already installed it, and then started it up per the instructions at the site above.  In my case I have configured the "domain" wc_spaces, since I want to setup to use Webcenter Portal: Spaces locally.

Take a Backup/Snapshot of the VirtualBox Image

Of course nothing will go wrong, right?!?!  But just in case, make sure you at least snapshot your VM prior to following these steps.

Adding Webcenter Portal Portlet Producers

Since the virtual machine does not include the Omniportlet and Web Clipping portlet out of the box, you'll need to install these and integrate the new WC_Portlet server installed into the VMConfig application Oracle ships with the virtual machine.

Odd numeric issue with XSLT subtraction

On my project that automates a business process within Peoplesoft, we recently ran into an issue where we were updating a Component Interface with a number representing U.S. dollars and it complained about the length.

Upon investigation I could see that for some reason we were trying to insert the value 1.48999999997 into a field that only supports 2 digits past the decimal point, or a scale of 2. So this indicated to me 2 issues with our project:

1. The Java web service we wrote to call the Peoplesoft component interface did not handle erroneous data being sent in, and
2. Somewhere in our automation code before this we were creating a bad currency amount.

To solve the Java web service issue, I noticed our interface classes used both floats and doubles for the currency amounts. And since the Peoplesoft component interface classes required BigDecimals for all the amount fields, I figured the BigDecimal conversion was likely the issue. The code was converting these using the BigDecimal.valueOf(long) or BigDecimal.valueOf(double) methods. While stepping through a JUnit test case I wrote, I could see that the amount was not getting scaled or rounded at all, so we were writing 1.48999999997 into the field causing the error. After revisiting the javadocs for BigDecimal to refresh my memory, I could see we likely needed to simply call the setScale(scale, RoundingMethod) to ensure we didn't try to insert such values in the future. After the change I unit tested it again and could see that now we could handle all the various data values sent in and correctly scale and round the value accordingly.

The other issue was tracked down by my fellow developer to an XSLT that was doing a simple subtraction of 2 currency values, but for some reason was creating this strange value. In this test case the original numbers were similar to 2450-2448.51, which was resulting in 1.48999999997! I figured somehow this was related to the BigDecimal class as well, behind the scenes used by the XSL engine in OC4J (Xalan?). As a workaround, we multiplied the value by 100, rounded it using the XSLT round() function, then divided again by 100 to ensure the correct scale was applied. While ugly it at least functioned as expected.

Using DBMS_LOCK package to implement singleton pattern

One thing that is inevitable as you start replacing batch-oriented integration strategies with more real-time, transactional strategies like BPEL and ESB, especially in a clustered environment, is that you'll run into APIs and database procedures that worked fine in a batch mode, but in a multi-threaded real time integration start breaking.

Using BPEL's Custom Indexes for BPEL Console Searching

Recently I had a request to store unique identifiers (nothing in violation of SOX requirements, a custom number only recognized at this client) as one of the custom indices in BPEL so associated instances could be searched using the BPEL Console.

While this isn't a difficult thing, as the API is well-defined and easy to use within an embedded Java activity, I ran into some things that may save you some debugging time in the future, or myself when I search my own blog later to "remember" how I got it working as expected.

This blog posting will be short and sweet. The one caveat that I found was if you have either an XML-based or Message-based variable, be careful with the getVariableData function, as it will generally return an Oracle XMLElement object, so you'll need to get the text from it and not call the toString() function of it when setting the custom index. I've generally found it much easier to create a Simple-type variable of type String, then use a Copy operation with an Assign activity to get the value from within either an XML-based or Message-based variable into the simple String variable, then in the embedded Java it's easy to use getVariableData(variableName).toString() to set the custom index.

Publishing large XML docs from BPEL to an XMLType column

As is often the case, this was purely a trial-and-error experiment that I got working in a specific way, but there may be other ways as well. In other words, use these instructions at your own risk, as I assume no liability for any problems these may cause in your environment.

Communicating with ActiveMQ 5.2 from Oracle AS 10.1.3.4

First, I have to say this was a very frustrating task. This was for a customer project that requested we create a BPEL process in 10.1.3.4 that listens to a queue in Apache ActiveMQ 5.2. Naturally, I began with a Google search for someone else who's done this.

The search revealed 2 interesting posts: nabble.com, which appears to cover exactly what I need to do, and Oracle ActiveMQ JCA adapter with OC4J 10g How-to article, which is more geared for using the ActiveMQ JCA adapter from within a custom J2EE application. My preference is to set it up to use the JMS JCA adapter as a third party queueing provider rather than setting up a new resource adapter entirely, especially since I wasn't sure how to even setup a new resource adapter in OC4J outside of a custom J2EE application per the article above.

Performance Tuning Oracle BPEL

First, there are many sites that list some psuedo random steps that are related to performance tuning, but very few indicate why you should be doing them. While I can't answer why for all of them, I can provide the benefit of experience at least.