Known limitations with the Web Center Interaction

By: Vasanth June 10, 2009

Hey all!

Over the last few months, I've had 2 customers run into 2 separate limitations with the Oracle Web Center Interaction(WCI) product, namely in version 6.1 MP1. The first of the two cases I had run into previously, so that prompted the idea for this post to share and build a running list of these limitations. The second of the 2 cases led me to dig deeper to find the reason for these constraints. What are these limitations you ask?

Well for example, if you're working with ALUI 6.1MP1, did you know that the maximum number of pages created within a community is 25? Or that a community cannot be created within a folder more than 10 levels deep?

Some of you may be thinking: why would you want to create more than 25 pages. In my customer's case, their requirement was to have more than 25 pages organized within a community but have the majority of the pages hidden in the navigation.

These fixed values are actually hard-coded in the portal server library (a.k.a plumtreeserver), which I coincidentally covered in my last post. In particular, it's in the com.plumtree.server.PT_SERVERCONSTANTS class. It seems as if Oracle is moving towards getting rid of some of these unnecessary constraints. For example, the constraint on the number of community pages has been removed in 10gR3. If you're on an earlier version or if you hit another similar limitation, you have 2 simple choices but only one is a viable long term one. The first option would be to decompile the classes in the plumtreeserver.jar (or DLL for the .Net portal), modify the settings and rebuild the library. However, this option is not ideal as this would complicate product upgrades and Oracle support contracts.

The best approach is to try to look for some other workaround for these constraints. For the second limitation with admin folder levels, this still remains in 10gR3. One possible solution is to create a flatter taxonomy so that more subcommmunity levels can exist. If this isn't feasible or no other options are available, you may be faced with replacing the fixed value in the portal server library. Again, we advise you do this only with extreme caution. Please contact us if you'd like more information.

The initial idea behind this article was not the workarounds, but to create a running list of these "hardcoded" limitations within the WebCenter Interaction product stack and the respective workarounds. I've started the list off, but please post your comments on other limitations that you have run into along with any solutions. I'll be updating this post with all of the comments, so please submit any that you have found even if a workaround wasn't.

Portal Limitations

Limitation		Workaround
Cannot create more than 25 pages within a community (in ALUI 6.1 MP1 or earlier)		Create the pages in another community and move them into the target community.
Maximum number of MyPages is 6		None found yet!
Communities cannot be created within a folder which is "10 deep"		Restructure the taxonomy to gains some levels back
Maximum length for the name of a document in the knowledge directory is 255 characters		None found yet.
Maximum folder level in the Knowledge Directory is 28		Restructure the knowledge directory taxonomy when the limit is reached.

thanks,

Vasanth

Tags: Best Practices

Comments

Patrick Brentlinger on July 21, 2009

Experience rules manager -> Community Picker & various other community pickers won't allow you to navigate the directory tree when there are more than 50 communities in the portal environment. ver. 6.1 MP1 patch 1 that I know of. Work around is to uniquely name the community, add it to the rule and then change the name back. The down side is that your end user sees the incorrect name for a time while the work is being done. Bad when say you are trying to add the new "Home" community to a specific rule for one of your sites.

Vasanth on July 30, 2009

Hi Patrick, Thanks for the feedback. I tested this in version 6.5 and this worked fine. I'll add it to the list though for 6.1.1. Also, instead of the "rename" workaround, you could simply search for the community in the selector. And ironically, in the search results you'll run into another "limitation" where only 10 items per page are shown. thanks, Vasanth

Patrick Brentlinger on August 14, 2009

Thanks for verifying this one. I do use the search in the picker, however, if the communities are all names "home" then how will you find it, you have to rename them uniquely. On another note. It seems that collaboration server 4.2 portlets don't like doctype declarations of 4.01 transitional or strict. Which can be set in the portalconfig.xml as below 1 I'm not sure when or if this is resolved however.

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