Recent discussions on CapTech’s internal social media platform addressed a favorite challenge for technology professionals: how to describe what you do for a living to those without a lot of technical expertise.  To achieve that goal without boring your audience to tears, oversimplification is nearly inevitable.   Personally, I’ve found the threat of oversimplification even more daunting when I attempt to be a little bit specific about what I do by using not just an industry term, but a highly flexible industry term: portal.

It is very common to put a WebLogic Portal cluster behind a web server or load balancer.  Most implementations I have seen to date either use an F5, Apache Web Server, or a combination of the two to serve up the portal content.  If you are also trying to access the Portal Admin Console through the web server you most likely experienced some sort of session affinity issue.  I realize most IT shops will just access the Portal Admin Console through a specific combination of managed host and port.  However, if you have any desire to access the Portal Admin Console through a web server or load balancer (especially for CMS functions or just a friendly url), here is why the session affinity issue is presenting itself.

The Portal Admin Console was developed to use a non standard Cookie Name.  By default, weblogic applications will use the JSESSIONID Cookie Name to maintain the user session.  However, the WebLogic Portal Admin Console uses a differe

Thanks to Andy Pemberton for helping me with this one.  It definitely had me confused for a couple days.  This issue is specific to IE and only presents itself when you are exposing your portal over HTTP, but are accessing through an HTTPS load balancer or web server.  The result is a mixed content popup from IE everytime you access a page.  This is caused by an iframe shim being inserted by WebLogic portal for the automatic menu navigation.  The fix is easy and straightforward, but finding the solution was not as easy.

To fix this issue, navigate in your Portal Web project to the Merged Project Content "virtual" directory in Eclipse which should be directly under the Portal Web project when viewing in the Portal perspective.  Under that directory, navigate to framework -> skins -> bighorn -> msie.  Right-

If you have ever created a WebLogic Portal domain, you are aware that the Domain Wizard automatically creates your Portal Database schema.  This is very nice if you are a developer or are new to the product, as it allows most anyone to create a fully functional Portal domain in minutes.  However, this is not a long term solution for building out multiple environments with a repeatable and scripted process. 

WebLogic Portal comes with all the necessary SQL scripts to create the required DB resources.  However, it unfortunately does not provide clear documentation on how to leverage these scripts, nor does Oracle provide a master SQL script for executing the provided SQL scripts in the correct order.

I am going provide the steps to create this master SQL script for any supported WebLogic Portal DB.  Also, I will provide the steps for the Oracle DB, you can easily adapt these for any supported DB.  For the purpose

I am officially kicking off a WebLogic Portal 10.x Solutions series of blogs.  I am focusing on WebLogic Portal 10.x because it seems to lack the depth of documentation and examples that BEA has produced in the past and the product is bigger than ever.  As I have witnessed at my clients, this has led to unnecessary frustration and confusion.  My goal is to address some of the more common challenges I have seen and provide simple solutions.  I will primarily address issues I have seen cause frustration at multiple clients as they should pertain to a wider audience. 

I plan on starting my series with the following topics: