The JavaEE Xperience

I was working on a PoC to integrate Bing and Google maps with webcenter. The idea was to use the javascript apis for this. While doing this, I encountered this strange issue.

I had a taskflow with two page fragments and this was meant to be embedded as a region in another page. The bug is that javascript included using the af:resource doesn’t get loaded in any page fragment other than the default activity. Presumably looks like the af:resource contents are not (re)painted when the region gets repainted. This happens with inline javascripts and also source-linked javascripts. The workaround is to use trh:Script instead of af:resource or (less elegantly) to embed all the required javascript into the default activity page. I chose to go with option 1.

P.S: There are other gotchas with the maps integration. I had to turn off PPR navigation to make the maps work. It looks like neither the Google nor the Bing API is particularly fond of div’s that are dynamically inserted into the HTML DOM. That is what I think happens with PPR navigation i.e. ADF rewrites the DOM (via Javascript?) with the new page elements.

What the title says.

The blog appears to be under some kind of redirection attack. Still attempting to fix.

This was a gotcha moment.

A colleague was attempting to create a custom taskflow for use in WebCenter Spaces. So this is what he did.

1) Deployed the custom taskflow as an ADF Library
2) Added the jar into the libraries of the WebCenterSpacesSharedLibExtension project and ensured the shared library deployment included it in the WAR.
3) Deployed the shared library to weblogic.
4) Deployed extend.spaces with the new library reference.

Everything went smoothly except the user couldn’t even get to the Login page anymore!! :-O The browser displayed the following

OracleJSP error: oracle.jsp.parse.JavaCodeException: Line # 6, oracle.jsp.parse.JspParseTagScriptlet@22e077e8
Error: Java code in jsp source files is not allowed in ojsp.next mode.

On looking at the log files there was this exception (see fullstack below) -

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Application was not properly initialized at startup, could not find Factory: javax.faces.application.ApplicationFactory

This sounded a bit weird. How can a Faces factory class be missing in the WebCenter domain? After all, WebCenter uses ADF which is a Faces implementation. It was the most curious thing.  Now, I don’t have a proper explanation for this but the problem was caused by the fact that the web.xml in the shared library contained all the ADF and Faces related references – servlets, filters and the like.  

I can only hazard a guess – when weblogic tries to load the library reference (quite naturally this has to be done before the web application – Spaces, in this case – is initialized). Now, the shared library contains a web.xml that among other things defines servlets and filters that are Faces-related. So, weblogic attempts to load up the filters (the TrinidadFilter is of specific interest in the stacktrace). However, the shared library does not go through the Faces web application lifecycle and does not get initialized as a Faces application (meaning the ApplicationFactory didn’t get init-ed). Anyway, cleaning out the web.xml worked the magic.

Of course, we still have the question of what happened with the web.xml. If you look at the vanilla web.xml that ships with the WebCenterSpacesSharedLibExtension project, you will see that it has no Faces references and in fact, only references a custom servlet. What happened was this – when the ADF Library was added to the library references of WebCenterSpacesSharedLibExtension, JDeveloper in all helpfulness went ahead and configured the web.xml to add ADF support. Eeeks!!! A simple enough thing but took an hour or so to get to the “Duh!” moment.

java.lang.IllegalStateException: Application was not properly initialized at startup, could not find Factory: javax.faces.application.ApplicationFactory
        at javax.faces.FactoryFinder$FactoryManager.getFactory(FactoryFinder.java:725)
        at javax.faces.FactoryFinder.getFactory(FactoryFinder.java:239)
        at oracle.adfinternal.view.faces.config.rich.FacesDatabindingConfigurator._setupAdfDatabindingForJsf(FacesDatabindingConfigurator.java:122)
        at oracle.adfinternal.view.faces.config.rich.FacesDatabindingConfigurator.init(FacesDatabindingConfigurator.java:53)
        at org.apache.myfaces.trinidadinternal.config.GlobalConfiguratorImpl.init(GlobalConfiguratorImpl.java:399)
        at oracle.adfinternal.view.faces.webapp.rich.RegistrationFilter.init(RegistrationFilter.java:53)
        at org.apache.myfaces.trinidadinternal.webapp.TrinidadFilterImpl.init(TrinidadFilterImpl.java:110)
        at org.apache.myfaces.trinidad.webapp.TrinidadFilter.init(TrinidadFilter.java:54)
        at weblogic.servlet.internal.FilterManager$FilterInitAction.run(FilterManager.java:332)
        at weblogic.security.acl.internal.AuthenticatedSubject.doAs(AuthenticatedSubject.java:321)
        at weblogic.security.service.SecurityManager.runAs(SecurityManager.java:120)
        at weblogic.servlet.internal.FilterManager.loadFilter(FilterManager.java:98)
        at weblogic.servlet.internal.FilterManager.preloadFilters(FilterManager.java:59)
        at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.preloadResources(WebAppServletContext.java:1876)
        at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppServletContext.start(WebAppServletContext.java:3153)
        at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppModule.startContexts(WebAppModule.java:1508)
        at weblogic.servlet.internal.WebAppModule.start(WebAppModule.java:482)
        at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleStateDriver$3.next(ModuleStateDriver.java:425)
        at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:52)
        at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleStateDriver.start(ModuleStateDriver.java:119)
        at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ScopedModuleDriver.start(ScopedModuleDriver.java:200)
        at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleListenerInvoker.start(ModuleListenerInvoker.java:247)
        at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleStateDriver$3.next(ModuleStateDriver.java:425)
        at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:52)
        at weblogic.application.internal.flow.ModuleStateDriver.start(ModuleStateDriver.java:119)
        at weblogic.application.internal.flow.StartModulesFlow.activate(StartModulesFlow.java:27)
        at weblogic.application.internal.BaseDeployment$2.next(BaseDeployment.java:636)
        at weblogic.application.utils.StateMachineDriver.nextState(StateMachineDriver.java:52)
        at weblogic.application.internal.BaseDeployment.activate(BaseDeployment.java:205)
        at weblogic.application.internal.EarDeployment.activate(EarDeployment.java:58)
        at weblogic.application.internal.DeploymentStateChecker.activate(DeploymentStateChecker.java:161)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.AppContainerInvoker.activate(AppContainerInvoker.java:79)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.activate(AbstractOperation.java:569)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.activateDeployment(ActivateOperation.java:150)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.ActivateOperation.doCommit(ActivateOperation.java:116)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.operations.AbstractOperation.commit(AbstractOperation.java:323)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handleDeploymentCommit(DeploymentManager.java:844)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.activateDeploymentList(DeploymentManager.java:1253)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentManager.handleCommit(DeploymentManager.java:440)
        at weblogic.deploy.internal.targetserver.DeploymentServiceDispatcher.commit(DeploymentServiceDispatcher.java:163)

While exploring options to develop an upload-to-database feature, I came across repeated suggestions that using Oracle MultiMedia (previously InterMedia) datatypes (OrdDoc, OrdImage, etc.) was the way to go. A few forums started me off in the right direction. This one for e.g. However, it wasn’t as straightforward to get it working especially given that there was no documentation whatsoever around OrdDomain types in the Fusion guides. So these are the steps that need to be done. Read the rest of this entry »

The weblogic server provides a nifty API –  weblogic.servlet.security.ServletAuthentication. This class allows you to invoke authentication services from any controller – Servlets, JSF Managed Beans. This is pretty cool as you can do away with the j_security_check authentication and build your custom logic. Or perform programmatic authentication.

I am currently using this for a WebCenter Portal project where, based on a set of database derived parameters, I have to force the user to perform certain actions after login. My login page currently contains a custom login taskflow that implements the necessary logic for me. Of course, there are other ways to do this, but I needed to use ADF components (including BC) and using a bounded task flow seemed the best bet.

Note:

1) The ServletAuthentication class is present in the file wlserver_10.3\server\lib\weblogic.jar

2) If the logic requires logging the user out while in the taskflow, use ServletAuthentication.logout() instead of ServletAuthentication.invalidateAll(). If invalidateAll() is used, any navigation after this will result in an error.

In the default WebCenter Portal generated by JDeveloper, anonymous-role is granted “view” privilege on the home page. This may not always be desirable. The portal may not have any public content to put on the home page. In my current project, the entire portal has to be secured and available only to authenticated users. You would imagine this is a straight-forward thing to achieve but it’s not.

To turn off access to home page, I edited the page hierarchy and removed the grants assigned to anonymous-role. Now, when the user attempts to access /faces/oracle/webcenter/portalapp/pages/home.jspx, the user gets redirected correctly to the login page. However, if the user were to use the pretty url /pages_home the server throws a 404 error (perhaps an incorrectly flagged 403?) and the user is left with a very unhelpful error page. The trouble with this is that the user may choose to bookmark after his/her initial login and that bookmark will invariably point at the pretty URL.

There is also another side-effect to this. When the user hits logout, webcenter redirects the user to the current page after logout. Given that faces-config.xml contains a “logout_success” navigation case, I imagined that changing this to point at, say, the login page would work. Alas no. The only way to make this work was to change the Logout link to a goLink with the destination set to “adfAuthentication?logout=true&end_url=\faces\oracle\webcenter\portalapp\pages\login.jspx”.

Oh and this is w.r.t WebCenter 11.1.1.5.

Update: Thanks to Andrejus for an excellent workaround. His technique to solve the Session time-out problem can be applied here too.

I have been trying to find ways to enable single sign-on between WebCenter Spaces and custom portals. Without using OAM or OID.

I tried using SAML to simulate SSO. This hit a road-block because I couldn’t find a way to make ADFAuthentication work with SAML. The only configuration that allowed auto-login to work left the user with a blank screen (as it involved using /adfAuthentication as the destination target).

The only other way forward is to use a 3rd party SSO platform (JOSSO) for e.g. and see if WebCenter can be configured to work with it. I don’t have very high hopes for this. Oracle’s documentation limits itself to OID/OAM as the SSO provider and does not even mention the possibility of using a 3rd party SSO solution.

Have you had any successes (or failures) in this area? I would love to hear of how your attempts went.

When you copy the WebCenter FX skin, the copied skin doesn’t work as expected. Without any changes to the copy, I would expect the skin to render the same as WebCenter FX but it doesn’t. My guess is that the copied skin doesn’t inherit properly from the internal base skin used by WebCenter FX. The only way to overcome this is to copy the contents of the internal skin css into the copied skin. Read the rest of this entry »

John blogs here on a cool way to add CSS menus to a WCS site template.

Interesting how he has dropped a DIV directly into the template. Without being constrained by the ADF provided layouts, a UI designer should be able to develop some very cool templates for sites.