Oracle WebCenter Spaces Task Flow Customization

I’v posted a blog about how to customize Oracle WebCenter task flows in your own custom application.

Some of us might also wonder how to do such kinds of customizations on Spaces.

There are some differentiates between custom application and Spaces.

Here are some tips of those:

1. Make WebCenter Spaces Task Flow Libraries Available to Your Application

To customize the WebCenter Spaces task flows, you need to include WebCenter Spaces View JAR file in your customization project.

The WebCenter View jar (webcenter-app-view.jar) is packaged and shipped with WebCenter Spaces, and is located here:
FMW_HOME/lib/java/internal/oracle.webcenter.spaces/11.1.1.0.0/webcenter-app-view.jar
FMW_HOME is the installed home of the WebCenter Spaces install.

WebCenter Service task flows, such as the Discussion Forum and Mail task flows, are part of the WebCenter Extension and are available in the Task Flows folder in the WebCenter Services Catalog, located in the Resource Palette in JDeveloper.

To set up JDeveloper for WebCenter Spaces task flow customization:

(1) In the Application Navigator, right-click the ViewController project for your WebCenter application and choose Project Properties.

(2) In the Project Properties dialog, select Libraries & Classpath and click Add JAR /Directory….

(3) Navigate to the Oracle WebCenter Spaces installation directory and select webcenter-app-view.jar.

(4) Click Select.

(5) Click OK.

(6) Save your files.

(7) In the Application Navigator, next to the Projects drop-down list, click the Navigator Display Options icon and select Show Libraries.

(8) Save all your files.

2. Applying Seeded Customizations to Deployed WebCenter Applications

In previous section, we customized WebCenter task flows for different scenarios. The output of these exercises is the generated MDS customization. The customizations show up as .xml.xml or .jspx.xml files in the View project of the application under “libraryCustomization” package.

These customization documents are essentially instructions for MDS to apply delta on top of the base document that is shipped to show the customized behavior at runtime. Once you create the customizations, you must apply them to the deployed WebCenter application.

If those customized task flows are used in your own custom WebCenter application, the customizations in MDS will be deployed to WebCenter container as well as the custom WebCenter application. So you can skip this step. But for Spaces, we have to apply those customizations to WebCenter Spaces application seperately.

To see customizations performed on Oracle WebCenter task flows in JDeveloper at runtime, you must import these customizations to the MDS repository of the deployed WebCenter application. Since this step updates the runtime WebCenter application metadata repository, you should first back up the MDS schema before performing this step. Oracle also advises that you test your customizations in a development or stage environment first.

These steps cover how to apply the seeded customizations to a deployed instance of Oracle WebCenter Spaces. The same steps can be followed to deploy customizations to a custom WebCenter application repository as well.

To import design time Oracle WebCenter task flow seeded customizations to the MDS repository:

(1) While the your application is open in JDeveloper, rebuild the ViewController project by right-clicking ViewController and choosing Rebuild ViewController.jpr.

(2) Next, create a JAR profile and package the library customizations under the ViewController project in the JAR archive. In the Application Navigator, these customizations display under ADFLibraryCustomization package. On your file system, the customizations are located in the libraryCustomization folder under ViewController. Right-click the Model project and select New.

(3) In the New Gallery, select Deployment Profiles, choose JAR File from the Items list, and click OK to generate the JAR profile.

(4) Create a name for the JAR file, such as SampleWebCenterApplicationCustomizations.

(5) In the Edit JAR Deployment Profile Properties dialog, click Filters on the left, then select all the customization documents in the ADFLibrarycustomization package, then click OK.

(6) Copy this JAR file, which now contains the customizations, to the machine where the WebCenter application is deployed. Note: Maintain a backup of this file so that you always have a version of the customizations for this application.

(7) Extract the JAR to a temporary directory on the machine, for example /tmp/wc-cust.

(8) Use the MDS WLST import command to import the task flow customizations to the application’s MDS repository.

The following is an example of the command to import customizations.

wls:/weblogic/serverConfig>importMetadata(application='webcenter',
server='srg',
fromLocation='/tmp/wc-cust',
docs='/**')

(9) Then testing those customizations on Spaces.