After playing with Oracle Portal after a while, you realize the portlet styles are fairly limited in what you can do. You can change colors, font sizes, and overwrite images if you want, but that’s about it. With being tasked to make the portlets look like our other applications, I found where Oracle is rendering the portlet display code. For WSRP exposed portlets, what I’ve is de-compile the ‘RenderDispatcherResponse’ class in the ‘wsrp-dispatcher.jar’ file which is located within the portal.ear application. JAD 1.5.8e decompiles it fairly nicely. So, pull that class out and replace it with your own (using the same name and packaging of course) and you’ve got a new way to out put the portlet header, title, and footer.
This is very handy for instance, if you want to put a cool DHTML flashy menu system on each portlet, instead of having individual icons for each action. Total control within that class for WSRP / JSR-168 exposed portlets.
I’m still looking for how Oracle writes the other ‘out of the box’ portlets, like the HTML portlets, OmniPortlet, etc. I’ll update the post once I find that.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:48 am
Someone is reading… keep up the writing and I’ll keep up the reading.
Very interested in any and all thoughts, observations, and ideas when it comes to making Boracle Bortal more intriguing. I think it really can be a solid product, and the back end can be very powerful, but I feel that Oracle has not really given enough in the way of resources to the Portal developer.
The user experience needs to be altered from the Oracle default to keep users from bonking their sleepy foreheads on their keyboards, and there should have been detailed information provided by Oracle about how to approach or accomplish this.
With so much documentation, one would think there would be more info about how to effectively develop within Oracle Portal to achieve results that are comparable to those found with other contemporary web apps.
But I could go on, and on, and on…. I am always happy to find someone who is trying to make Oracle Portal work up to the expectations of the day and who is willing to share their findings.
Much appreciated.
October 24th, 2007 at 10:57 am
Hello ‘me’,
Thanks for reading, glad you found this blog, and I hope that it was a bit helpful.
The idea of skinning and controlling the overall look and feel of Oracle’s portal is a headache at best.
They need to seriously bump up the usability and customization, as back end solidarity will only take you so far.