9.1 Mobile Support in Oracle Portal

Oracle Portal uses Oracle Application Server Wireless to process requests from wireless devices, and transform content provided by the portal into an appropriate format. To enable mobile access in your portal, your portal administrator must configure how Oracle Portal uses OracleAS Wireless (Global Settings: Mobile tab). For more information, see the Oracle Fusion Middleware Administrator's Guide for Oracle Portal. You'll find this guide on the Oracle Portal documentation page of the Oracle Technology Network at http://www.oracle.com/technology/products/ias/portal/documentation.html.

What Is a Mobile Page?

A mobile page is a page that is specifically designed for display on a mobile device. Mobile pages present information in a hierarchical tree structure. The structure is defined by levels. Any level, including the top level, can contain any number of portlets, items, and levels. This provides the flexibility to represent a large amount of content, yet limits the list displayed at any one time to fit the limited display sizes of most mobile devices.

Things to Consider Before You Create a Mobile Page

Some things to consider before you create mobile pages:

If you use standard pages exclusively, they may not display optimally on the small screens available on mobile devices. On the other hand, if you decide to create a standard and a mobile version of pages, you'll end up maintaining two sets of portal pages.
If you anticipate any mobile access, be sure to test how your standard pages will look on mobile devices. Go to your standard page and click the Mobile: Preview link in the toolbar at the top of the page (in Edit mode).
Some Oracle Portal features are not available on mobile pages such as item versioning, item level security, and approval chains.

Mobile-Enabled Content

Any standard page can be displayed in a mobile device but only mobile-enabled content is displayed. When editing a standard page, page designers can preview how the page will look in a mobile device by clicking the Mobile: Preview link in the toolbar at the top of the page.

The structure of the standard page is flattened into a list of mobile-enabled portlets and items from which users can make selections. Any tabs on the page are converted into levels, which allow users to drill down and view more content. For more detail, see Section 9.5, "Viewing Standard Pages on Mobile Devices".

Mobile-enabled portlets are those portlets capable of handling MobileXML. It's easy to know which portlets are mobile-enabled by noting which portlets are available in the portlet repository when you add a portlet to a mobile page.

Mobile-enabled items include any items based on BaseURL, BasePageLink, and BaseSubPageDisplay. This means the item types potentially available for mobile pages include Simple URL, URL, Wireless URL, Simple Page Link, Page Link, Login/Logout Link and SubPage Display.