Recently in Publisher Category

Ruh, roh.  This one's a doozy.  Yeah, I'm pretty high on Publisher 6.5, especially the feature where Publisher no longer issues a redirect for published content, greatly improving performance because it allows the portal to cache all this content.

Unfortunately, I just ran into a major problem with this feature in a dev upgrade: the servlet for streaming all this content back doesn't do any transformations on any of the URLs.  This is bad, since if you're doing an upgrade, you've likely got hundreds or thousands of Content Items with relative links or images in them.  For example, suppose you have an existing Content Item with an image in it (that has been published to the same folder in Publisher).  The reference for this image will likely be:

<img src="myimage.jpg">

This worked fine with the old redirector, as the image tag would be transformed:

http://server/portal/server.pt/gateway/PTARGS_0_1_493_234_684_43/http%3B/ptpublisher%3B7087/publishedcontent/publish/folder1/folder2/image.jpg

But with the new content streaming functionality, this link does NOT get transformed the way you'd expect; the portal sees the relative link as relative to the SERVLET, not relative to the existing Content Item.  So the browser sees a URL like this:

http://server/portal/server.pt/gateway/PTARGS_0_1_493_234_684_43/http%3B/ptpublisher%3B7087/ptcs/PublishedContentServlet/image.jpg

... which obviously isn't right.

In fact, Oracle seems to be aware of this: in the content.properties file, they changed the LTCUseRelativeURLs setting to "false" (it was "true" in 6.4).  That way, for NEW Content Items, the URLs are all absolute, which prevents this problem from coming up.

I was going to revoke my recommendation to upgrade to 6.5 for now, but came across a really easy fix to get all the benefits of 6.5 without this glaring bug.  Hit the link for the workaround.

I mentioned the ALI Interoperability Matrix (login required) in the Publisher 6.5 post, and realized that I don't always go to the official site to check compatible versions of the Aqualogic stack; instead I just use a locally saved copy because it's quicker to pull up. 

Obviously, the locally saved snapshot can get out of date over time, but it's nice to have when you need it in a pinch (having been on sites that don't allow you to connect to their network).

If you want an Excel copy of the matrix, you can download it here.  Keep in mind it's only current as of the end of August 2008, but for prior versions of the portal, the information should be pretty static. For the latest version, visit one.bea.com (while it lasts).

As you may have heard, Publisher 6.5 was released last week.  And this isn't one of those baby releases that just changes the BEA branding to Oracle - it's a legit upgrade, and I'd encourage everyone to make the move - if not for the new features, for the boatload of bug fixes.  Even if you're not ready to upgrade to the 6.5 portal, it's supported with ALI 6.1 MP1 and MP2 (see the Interoperability Matrix - login required).

See the release notes for full details, but here's a quick summary from the huge list of bug fixes and enhancements:

Adaptive Tag is broken in Rich Text Editor at switching WYSIWIG to HTML editor. (Issue #54748)
Only "Time", "Page Name" & Community name" transformer tags display the value. (Issue #42867)

Rich Text Control does not support anchor tags '#' in <a href=#</a> links. (Issue #55759)

These issues are reason enough to upgrade to 6.5!  No longer do you have to use Presentation Templates to leverage adaptive tags - the new Dojo WYSIWYG editor doesn't delete your tags, and even shows them unformatted in the rich text editor that you know they're there.  Sure, ideally it would be nice if these tags were actually parsed (so the rich text editor would show the actual opener link below), but I'm not complaining - this is a huge step forward.

 

Publisher content is accessed via a redirect.jsp page which AquaLogic Interaction does not cache. This can cause major performance problems. (Issue #48758)

In a clustered environment, published_content_noredirect.jsp fails to proxy the entirety of the published content page. (Issue #60272)

This is also an enormouse improvement!  Rather than issuing a redirect, the Publisher Redirector now streams the data from the Published Content server directly back to the Portal Server.  Why is this big?  Because now the portal is able to cache all this published content, resulting in dramatically lower loads to Publisher and dramatically increased performance for end users.

Also of note, this was actually an undocumented feature in 6.4, which was discovered by Fabien Sanglier.  In fact, he even fixed the bug about all content not coming back.  Ah, Fabien, always ahead of the times...

When you publish a document to the Knowledge Directory, it uses the description as the filename. (Issue #62669)

We've run into this one before - good to know that you no longer need to beg support for the critical fix!

 

Finally, the new Dojo Rich Text Editor includes a spell checker.  Hit the link for a screen shot of that wonderful piece of functionality in action.

Well, Oracle's gift keeps givin':  First, they published unlimited license keys for all ALUI products, and now, they've release maintenance packs for everything with all the licensing stripped out completely!

Go Oracle!

 

Update June 9, 2008: Sorry ladies and gents, I just spent the day trying to upgrade our dev environment here.  After downloading hundreds of megabytes worth of installer packages that wouldn't even open in Winzip, I tried again and was able to open them.  Sadly, they (at least Publisher and Collab, and I assume the rest of them) still required license keys.  I suspect what happened is that whovever uploaded the real updated installers didn't FTP them as binary files (which would corrupt the files), and they rolled back to the original versions today.  I'm sure it's coming, but I was also a little disappointed in this false start...

 

Update June 10, 2008:  OK, my fault.  The link above makes it pretty clear that the delicensed products are on Oracle's download site and not available through BEA's download center.

My love for e-licensing at BEA, or lack thereof, was no secret.  I was mostly appalled as an employee when I was working at client sites - who completely trusted me with administrative access to their servers - and tried to get a license key.  Often this process took days, and occasionally took weeks.  In fact, we've got a client struggling with trying to wrangle legit keys from eLicensing now, who didn't even know that that particular product (Analytics) even HAD keys!

Well, no more.  The wicked witch is dead.  The clouds have parted.  Angels are singing.  Oracle has released generic license keys to legitimately licensed customers.

Now, people, I'm not saying this gives everyone free reign to steal Oracle products or use them in ways they're not licensed for.  I have no idea what Oracle's new licensing scheme is - particularly around using instances in development and DR environments (a common sore point with license keys) - so be good with these things.  I understand Oracle focuses more on customer audits than oppressive licensing schemes, so make sure you stay legit - contact your sales person if you've got any questions!

Without further ado, you can download the generic ALI keys here. 

Use them responsibly - our customers always maintained compliance at Plumtree without the keys, and I'm sure you all will again (well, I guess they did: I was just a consultant - what do I know?).

I ran into this one a couple months ago with our friends at the American Diabetes Association. (Give early, give often :))

Seems that with the latest build of Publisher (6.4), if you Publish to the Knowledge Directory using a Content Item that has a Description field, that field is used when generating the Open Document URL. And it's not even an "escaped" string, so even if the description isn't too long (which it often is), some characters in the URL could still end up breaking the link if they're not valid URL characters. It's easy enough to tell if you're affected by this - just check out the properties of the document in the Knowledge Directory and take a look at the "Open Document URL". If it looks like this:

... you're having the problem.

The good news is that this is a known issue (read: documented bug) in Publisher and it has been fixed. The bad news is that the fix won't be generally available until the next version of Publisher is released. If this is a critical issue for you, though, you can request an untested, unsupported Critical Fix from ALUI Support - mention the critical fix for bug #62669. You'll need to demonstrate that you actually are affected by this issue, as the patch hasn't gone through full regression testing, but I can tell you, it's been working great for ADA for the past 2 months!

Here's a neat trick: ALUI Publisher allows any HTML in the "Instructions" field for properties in a Data Entry Template. Because this HTML is then included when creating or editing a Content Item, you can do all sorts of things with the page.

One of the cooler things you can do is leverage adaptive tags in this field. So, say you want a portlet that allows you to highlight various communities in your portal, and you want content managers to be able to just select a community from a list rather than looking up and typing in an ID. This is just one example; obviously you could select any object with the tree control, so use your imagination if you'd like to select users, portlets, or any other administrative object.

You can use the Unified Tree View adaptive tag in the "Instructions" field for a particular property, then use the Common Opener adaptive tag in your presentation template to automatically link to the community. Content Managers then don't have to worry about all the nuances of creating links to other communities, and don't have to remember community IDs when creating the Content Items.

For example, create a new portlet based off the "News" Portlet Template, and make some minor tweaks:

1. Add a new Integer property called comm_id to the "News Article" Data Entry Template:
   
   
   
2. Open the property and go to the "HTML" view for the instructions:
   

   The instructions contain the tree view adaptive tag and a call-back function that changes the text of the property based off the item selected:

   <script language="JavaScript">
   function PickerSubmit(arrIn) {
   document.getElementsByName('ptext4')[0].value = arrIn[0].ObjectID;
   }
   </script>
   
   <pt:standard.tree xmlns:pt='http://www.plumtree.com/xmlschemas/ptui/' value="Pick a Community" class="gContentSection" pt:windowName='myWindow' pt:windowFeatures='location=no,menubar=no,height=500,width=300' pt:RootID='1' pt:Multi='false' pt:SelectMd='2' pt:SubmitMd='2' pt:Submit='PickerSubmit' pt:Title='Community' pt:SubTitle='Pick a Community' pt:Class='512'/>

3. Finally, this property can be used in the "News Article" presentation template just like you would any other pcs:value; you can even include it inside a commonopener adaptive tag to automatically create a link to that community.

Now, when people go to create/edit the Content Item based off this DET, they'll see a button underneath the property field where they would normally see "instructions". Clicking it opens a popup to get the list of communities, and selecting a community populates the field!

There is a major change that you need to make to the configuration of Publisher before deploying it into production and it is a change that is overlooked in a lot of ALUI deployments. When you install Publisher, it is not set up to use as much memory as a production instance of Publisher should use. Making this change is easy though, as the recommended configuration settings are actually in the config files, but are commented out. In order to make the change, open up the service.conf file in the ptcs/6.x/settings/config directory and find the following section:





Comment out the lines preceding this section dealing with java parameters and memory usage and then uncomment this section. Restart your publisher service and you are set for production! Check your publisher diagnostic page to make sure that the memory settings took...

If you've ever had Content Managers who produce content by cutting and pasting from Microsoft Word, chances are you've has problems with “Smart Quotes” or other characters that end up looking bizarre when they're presented in the portal:

This problem is due to the character encoding of the published content, which basically is the mapping of binary information to a specific readable character. As you already know, the ALUI Portal makes a request to a Published Content server to retrieve the HTML used for content in various portlets. The problem with smart quotes and other non-standard characters like this (technical details aside) is that the default character encoding doesn't include these characters.

The solution is simple: In your presentation templates, you have to specifically set the character set to UTF-8; this character set DOES have those unconventional characters used by Word. Notice that in Publisher, if you're creating News or Announcement portlets, this has already been done for you in the Presentation Template, so you're only likely to see this problem with custom templates.

In order to tell the portal what character set your content is using, just add this line to the top of your presentation template:

<META HTTP-EQUIV="Content-Type" CONTENT="text/html; charset=UTF-8">

... And that should do it. The same content used above now displays those characters properly:

Here's another quick and easy tip for AquaLogic Publisher. Did you know you can select multiple items in Publisher Explorer by clicking on a row containing Content Items or folders to select it, then holding down SHIFT and clicking on another row? (Remember, click the row, not the item itself).

This is particularly useful when publishing large numbers of folders. For example, if you wanted to publish an "Announcement" folder, you'd typically right-click on the folder and go to "Publish", right? The problem with that is that you get a relatively useless dialog that doesn't really tell you the status of what's going on, and with huge folders, you can sit and wait for hours or even days while Publisher works its magic, with no indication of where it's at in the process:

A better way to publish this large "Announcements" folder would be to go into the folder and select all of the items inside that folder using the shift-click method described above. Then, click "Edit" and choose "Publish":

That way, you can see where in the list of items you are at any time: