Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows

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Virtual portals reference

This topic provides information about configuring virtual portals, hints and tips, and known limitations.

It contains the following sections:

• Configuration tasks for administering virtual portals

  • create-virtual-portal

  • list-all-virtual-portals

  • modify-virtual-portal

  • delete-virtual-portal

• Information overview for configuring user populations for virtual portals

• Hints and tips

• Known limitations

 

Configuration tasks for administering virtual portals

The following sections lists and describes the configuration tasks for administering virtual portals. Before you use these configuration tasks to administer virtual portals, read the topics about Planning for virtual portals and Administering virtual portals carefully.

For details about the configuration program and about how to use the configuration tasks refer to About the configuration program. The tasks described here take the listed inputs as they must be specified in the property file wpconfig.properties.

The property file must be encoded in the ISO 8859-1 character encoding format.

 

create-virtual-portal

Creates a virtual portal.

 

Usage: Use this task to create a virtual portal.

 

Syntax: Invoked as part of the WPSconfig script file as follows:

• For Linux: ./WPSconfig.sh create-virtual-portal

• For i5/OS:

  • From the UserData directory: WPSconfig.sh -profileName profile_root create-virtual-portal

    where profile_root is the name of the WebSphere Application Server profile where WebSphere Portal Express is installed; for example, wp_profile.

• For Windows: WPSconfig.bat create-virtual-portal

 

Inputs:

• VirtualPortalTitle The title of the virtual portal. This input is mandatory.

• VirtualPortalRealm The realm of the virtual portal. This input is mandatory if you have realms enabled in the portal installation. If you do not have realms enabled, do not specify a value for the realm.

• VirtualPortalContext The portal context of the virtual portal. This input is mandatory. The context must be unique.

• VirtualPortalNlsFile The national language support (NLS) file for the virtual portal. This input is optional. You input the path and file name of your national language support file. You can create a national language support file to specify additional titles and descriptions in other languages for your virtual portal. For more details about the format of this file refer to Command reference for the Portal Scripting Interface under Property file format. If you do not specify an NLS file, the virtual portal is created with the title that you give as the value to the VirtualPortalTitle parameter only, but without titles in other languages and without descriptions. For a list of the languages that are available with WebSphere Portal Express and their language codes refer to Language support.

  Notes:

  1. If you specify no NLS file, the value that you specify by the VirtualPortalTitle input parameter will show to users as the title of the virtual portal in all language environments, independent of the system and browser locale and the user preferences.

  2. If you specify an NLS file, the value given for the virtual portal title in that NLS file overrides the title that you specify by the VirtualPortalTitle input parameter.

  3. If you specify an NLS file, do not use prefixes in that NLS file.

Assumptions: WebSphere Portal Express is running.

Error conditions: None

Dependencies: None

Tasks invoked: None

You pass the parameters listed above for the virtual portal to the configuration task.

If you want to pass a description for the virtual portal to the configuration task, you have to specify this in the NLS file.

The task creates the virtual portal itself, but it does not create any default content for the virtual portal or grant any access permissions to the virtual portal administrators. You need to perform these tasks separately after creating the virtual portal, for example by using the XML configuration interface. For details about the access permissions required for virtual portal administrators refer to Subadministrators of a virtual portal and their access roles and rights. For details about how to use the XML configuration interface refer to The XML configuration interface.

 

list-all-virtual-portals

Lists all virtual portals.

 

Usage: Use this task to list all virtual portals.

 

Syntax: Invoked as part of the WPSconfig script file as follows:

• For Linux: ./WPSconfig.sh list-all-virtual-portals

• For i5/OS:

  • From the UserData directory: WPSconfig.sh -profileName profile_root list-all-virtual-portals

    where profile_root is the name of the WebSphere Application Server profile where WebSphere Portal Express is installed; for example, wp_profile.

• For Windows: WPSconfig.bat list-all-virtual-portals

 

Inputs: None

 

Outputs: This tasks lists all your virtual portals, together with the following information:

• The title of the virtual portal

• The description of the virtual portal

• The realm of the virtual portal

• The object ID of the virtual portal.

Assumptions: WebSphere Portal Express is running.

Error conditions: None

Dependencies: None

Tasks invoked: None

 

The context of a virtual portal as specified by using the configuration task create-virtual-portal with the input parameter VirtualPortalContext cannot be shown by using the configuration task list-all-virtual-portals.

 

modify-virtual-portal

Modifies a virtual portal.

 

Usage: Use this task to modify a virtual portal by using its object ID. To determine the correct object ID of the virtual portal, use the task list-all-virtual-portals.

 

Syntax: Invoked as part of the WPSconfig script file as follows:

• For Linux: ./WPSconfig.sh modify-virtual-portal

• For i5/OS:

  • From the UserData directory: WPSconfig.sh -profileName profile_root modify-virtual-portal

    where profile_root is the name of the WebSphere Application Server profile where WebSphere Portal Express is installed; for example, wp_profile.

• For Windows: WPSconfig.bat modify-virtual-portal

 

Inputs:

• VirtualPortalObjectId The object ID of the virtual portal. This input is mandatory for identification of the virtual portal that you want to modify.

• VirtualPortalRealm The realm of the virtual portal. You can only specify a realm if you have realms enabled in the portal installation.

• VirtualPortalNlsFile The National Language Support file of the virtual portal. You input the path and file name of your national language support file. You can create a national language support file to specify additional titles and descriptions in other languages for your virtual portal. For more details about the format of this file refer to Command reference for Portal Scripting Interface under Property file format.

  If you specify an NLS file, do not use prefixes in that NLS file.

Assumptions: WebSphere Portal Express is running.

Error conditions: None

Dependencies: None

Tasks invoked: None

If you want to modify the title or description of the virtual portal, you have to specify this in the NLS file accordingly.

 

delete-virtual-portal

Deletes a virtual portal.

 

Usage: Use this task to delete a virtual portal by using its object ID. To determine the correct object ID of the virtual portal, use the task list-all-virtual-portals.

 

Syntax: Invoked as part of the WPSconfig script file as follows:

• For Linux: ./WPSconfig.sh delete-virtual-portal

• For i5/OS:

  • From the UserData directory: WPSconfig.sh -profileName profile_root delete-virtual-portal

    where profile_root is the name of the WebSphere Application Server profile where WebSphere Portal Express is installed; for example, wp_profile.

• For Windows: WPSconfig.bat delete-virtual-portal

 

Inputs: VirtualPortalObjectId The object ID of the virtual portal. This input is mandatory.

Assumptions: WebSphere Portal Express is running.

Error conditions: None

Dependencies: None

Tasks invoked: None

 

Information overview for configuring user populations for virtual portals

This section gives an overview of the information that is available in the WebSphere Portal Express information center about configuring user populations, realms, and user registries for your virtual portals. The following links move from the general to the detailed and specific.

 

Read all of the information under the topics listed here before you start configuring the user populations for your virtual portals.

1. For an overview about portal security refer to Enabling security and Security Concepts.

2. For an overview about user management refer to Managing users and groups.

3. For details about how to create and configure Member Manager, realms and user registries refer to Using multiple realms and user registries. Review the sections about the Configuration and Sample Configuration. These sections list samples of the required xml files.

 

Hints and tips

The following hints and tips apply to virtual portals in WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0:

• Do not grant the subadministrators of virtual portals the access permissions to perform any installation related tasks, such as installation of portlets or themes. The isolation between the different virtual portals as provided by WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.0 is limited to some extent. All virtual portals share a common Java Virtual Machine (JVM). Therefore it is important to restrict the administration privileges of the virtual portal subadministrators and prevent them from installing their own code artefacts, such as themes or portlets. Unstable or malicious code that is introduced on one virtual portal can destabilize the entire portal installation and thereby all other virtual portals. A flexible way to introduce virtual portal specific portlets without impacting any other virtual portals is to use Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP). For more information about WSRP refer to Using WSRP services.

• Not all resources can be scoped to individual virtual portals. For example, all themes and skins are available to all virtual portals without restrictions. Credential vault, portlet services, and portal services are also common for an entire portal installation. They cannot be scoped to an individual virtual portal.

• The settings which are defined in the portal property files apply for the entire portal installation. You cannot specify separate settings for individual virtual portals.

• If you want to make use of the single signon feature that is provided by WebSphere Application Server, you have to use the same common domain suffix for all virtual portals.

• Document management, portal search, personalization, templates, and the Document Manager portlet are not aware of virtual portals.

• There are no virtual portal specific enhancements to the published portal commands and application programming interfaces.

• A URL mapping that is defined for a resource in a particular virtual portal must use the same URL context as the friendly URL context for that virtual portal itself. Example: In a virtual portal that uses the friendly URL mapping wps/portal/vp_1, all URL mappings for portal resources must start with wps/portal/vp_1, for example wps/portal/vp_1/url_1 and wps/portal/vp_1/url_2. Within this virtual portal a URL mapping such as wps/portal/url_1 is not valid, as the portion vp_1 of the URL Context is missing.

• The administration portlet Virtual Portal Manager cannot delete all resources that are associated with a virtual portal. For example, it does not delete additional URL mappings that administrators might have created for the virtual portal. You can use the XML configuration interface to do this.

• All virtual portals on a portal installation share a common logging and tracing.

• When you re-initialize a virtual portal by using the Virtual Portal Manager portlet, this applies the XML script for the default virtual portal content (or your custom script) again and recreates the default content of the virtual portal. Resources that you removed from the default content are recreated. Resources that you added to the default content remain in the virtual portal.

• You have to configure realms manually in the wmmur.xml configuration file. There is no portal configuration task for this. You need to restart WebSphere Application Server after reconfiguring Member Manager.

• The context of a virtual portal as specified by the configuration task create-virtual-portal and the input parameter VirtualPortalContext cannot be shown by using the configuration task list-all-virtual-portals.

• The Portal Access Control administration in the Resource Permissions portlet shows users from different realms who have role mappings on shared resources by their object IDs. Therefore, apply special care and consideration when deleting such portal resources: Do not delete resources on which users from other realms have role mappings, if they are required in other virtual portals. This applies to members of roles on portal resources that cannot be scoped and are therefore shared between the virtual portals. Role members who belong to the realm of your local virtual portal are displayed as usual, but role members who belong to different realms are displayed in a different manner:

  • Role members for shared resources who belong to the realm of the virtual portal under which you are currently working are listed by their actual names under which they were created.

  • Role members for shared resources that do not belong to the realm of the current portal are listed by their portal object IDs. For example, a role member from a different realm might be represented as 8_0_B.

  You find the list of role members under Administration > Access > Resource Permissions > Select Resource Type > Assigning Access for a resource > Edit Role, under the first column Members in the Role.

• You cannot create custom URLs in one virtual portal that address portal resource in another virtual portal. The reason is that both object IDs and unique names relate to resources of the local virtual portal. For details about how to create URLs refer to Creating custom links to portlets and pages.

 

Known limitations

The following sections describe known limitations with virtual portals.

 

Change of theme for virtual portal might not take effect

If you change the theme for a virtual portal by editing the virtual portal in the Virtual Portals portlet, the following problems might occur:

1. The selected theme might not show the next time you go into the Edit mode for the virtual portal.

2. The selected theme might not be applied to the virtual portal, and the virtual portal might still be displayed with the original theme.

 

Create the portal site search collection fails

 

Problem: If the file path length for the location of search collections exceeds its limit, the collection cannot be created. This can occur particularly when the portal site collection is created under Linux operating systems.

 

Cause: The file path length for the portal search collection is limited to 118 characters. If this limit is exceeded, the default collection cannot be created. The following items contribute to the length of the file path:

• The installation directory path. Under Linux operating systems the installation directory path name can be longer than under other operating systems.

• By default, the search collection for the portal site content is created under the path your_portal_install_directory/PortalServer/collections.

• The name of the virtual portal.

• The name of the search collection.

 

Solution: Proceed as follows:

1. Change the default directory location for the portal site search collection to a shorter path, so that the complete path and file name does not exceed a length of 118 characters. For details about how to do this refer to Configuring the default location for search collections.

2. Recreate the portal site search collection. For details about how to do this refer to Creating or resetting the portal site collection.

 

Related information

• About multiple virtual portals

• Usage scenarios for virtual portals

• Planning for virtual portals

• Administering virtual portals

• Portal configuration

• The XML configuration interface

• Administering the portal

• About the configuration program

 

Parent topic:

Multiple virtual portals

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