5.3 Using Oracle Portal to Affect Oracle Instant Portal

5.3.3.1 Determining How Many Items To Collect and When

You can change how many items are displayed in the News and Announcements portlets on the home page. The default setting is to display the ten most recently collected items over the past seven days. You can also change this setting so that items are collected over a different time period.

To change the number of items displayed in the News and Announcements portlets:

1. From the Navigator, click Edit Root Page beside the Oracle instant portal you want to work in.

   Figure 5-14 Editing the Home Page

   
   

2. Click the Edit Defaults icon above the News or Announcements portlet:

   Figure 5-15 Clicking the Edit Defaults Icon

   
   

3. Under Number of Items, enter the number of items to display by default in the Item Count field:

   Figure 5-16 Specifying the Number of Items to Display

   
   

To change the number of days over which items are collected:

1. From the Navigator, click Properties next to the Oracle instant portal you want to work on.

   Figure 5-17 Displaying the Properties

   
   

2. Click the Items tab.

3. Under New and Updated Icons, enter the number of days over which News and Announcement items should be collected in the Icon Display Period field:

   Figure 5-18 Specifying the Number of Days

   
   

5.3.3.2 Displaying Content From a Different Page

As stated in the online Help, it is not advisable to delete the News or Announcements pages, which are children of the Company page. If you do delete one of these pages, you'll find that the corresponding portlet disappears from the home page. To reinstate the portlet, you can create a new child page by the same name, then reconfigure the portlet to display content from that page. You can also use this capability to display something other than News and Announcements on the home page, or use it to achieve standard News and Announcements content across several portals.

Here are the step-by-step instructions you'll need:

1. Create a child page. You don't have to call the page News or Announcements unless this is the name you want to appear on the home page. You also do not have to make this page a child page of Company--the page can be located anywhere.

2. Click the Go To Portal Builder icon in the toolbar to go to the Oracle Portal Build tab.

   Figure 5-19 Go To Portal Builder Icon

   
   

3. Display the Navigator.

4. Go to the page group (which bears the same name as the Oracle instant portal) and drill down until you see the page you just created listed in the Navigator. Hover over the page name with your cursor and note the URL that appears in the status bar of your browser.

5. In the status bar, locate the parameter called pageid. The first number represents the page group; the second represents the page itself. In this example, the page group ID is 73, and the page ID is 70033. You'll need these numbers later, so jot them down.

   For 10.1.4, you can use the property sheet icon to display the id.

6. In the Path, located at the top of the Navigator, click Page Groups.

7. Click Edit Root Page next to your Oracle instant portal. This displays the portal's home page in edit mode.

8. Click the pencil icon next to the portlet with the missing title to display the Edit Defaults dialog.

9. In the Page Group field, enter the number of your page group. In the Page field, enter the page ID you wrote down in step 5. Click OK. Once the page reloads, you'll see that the portlet you just configured is set to the title of the new page.

10. Click View Page to see how the page will look to users.

    The content of the page you identified on the Edit Defaults dialog is now displayed on the home page.

5.3.4.1 Determining the Proper Synchronization Interval

Depending on your requirements, the appropriate synchronization interval can be anywhere from a few minutes to a few days. To determine your appropriate interval, consider:

• How often new content is added to the site. If you have a lot of content added frequently, you may want to run the synchronization job more often so that the content will be searchable.

• How many searches are conducted during a typical hour? If you have many people searching continuously, you'll want the index synchronization to be fresh. If not, you can wait for a longer period of time between updates.

When trying to determine the proper length of time between synchronizations, keep in mind the following performance considerations:

• It is more efficient to synchronize a larger number of rows on a single occasion than to repeatedly synchronize a smaller number of rows, as the index becomes less fragmented this way. Less fragmented index need to be optimized less frequently.

• Indexing a larger number of rows at once places a heavier load on the server. Synchronizing more frequently increases the total amount of work, but spreads the load on the server.

• Although the re-synchronization job synchronizes only those rows changed from the last synchronization, there is always some overhead, however small, in starting up the job itself.

5.3.4.2 Changing the Oracle Text Synchronization Interval

To set a new synchronization interval:

1. Change the directory to the mid-tier directory where the synchronization script resides:

   <ORACLE_HOME>/portal/admin/plsql/wws

2. In SQL*Plus, log on using the PORTAL name and password.

   To get the PORTAL schema password, you may need to use the Oracle Directory Manager administration tool. Refer to the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Internet Directory for instructions on how to start the Oracle Directory Manager and how to connect to a directory server.

   When connecting to the directory server:

   • Look in ORACLE_HOME/config/ias.properties for the values of OIDhost and OIDport, which are required to connect.

   • Log in using the username cn=orcladmin and the password you selected for the ias_admin user at install time. (Make sure that the password has not been changed.)

   • Once you are connected to the Oracle Directory Manager, navigate to the PORTAL directory entry to find the assigned password, as shown here:

     Figure 5-20 Directory Structure in Oracle Directory Manager

     
     

     Click orclResourceName=PORTAL and scroll down to the bottom of the Properties tab in the right hand pane. The password is shown as the orclpasswordattribute value.

     Once you have the PORTAL schema password, enter this SQL*Plus command to log in:

     sqlplus portal/<PORTAL schema password>

3. To stop the currently scheduled job, enter this command in SQL*Plus:

   SQL> @textjsub.sql STOP NOW 60

4. To start a new job, enter this command in SQL*Plus:

   SQL> @textjsub.sql START NOW 30

   In this example, the interval is set to 30 minutes. As soon as you enter this command the synchronization job runs immediately, and will run every 30 minutes thereafter.