Basics of Enterprise Portal development using Java

By Swetabh Shukla, Infosys Technologies Ltd

1           Some basic terminologies

1.1          Perspectives in SAP Netweaver Developer Studio

A Perspective is group of editors and views in the workbench window.

Eclipse has several default perspectives that provide easy access to functions and editors for specific purposes:

• Debug
• Java
• Java Browsing
• Resource editing

1.2          Portal Permissions

It defines user access rights. Every portal object can be assigned to an user or a group of users through user groups and roles.  Role is collection of information, services and tasks that are available to a group of users.

1.3          iView (Integrated Views)

An iView is a portal content building block. Each iView has a set of properties which are used at runtime. These properties differentiate one iView from other iView. Also an iView can be based on other iView and can inherit properties or can overwrite some properties of parent iView on which it is based.

Users can access iViews assigned to their roles. iView can be assigned to portal pages. These pages can be further assigned to any number of user roles. A user can access all the iViews contained on that page to which his roles have access rights. iViews can also be assigned directly to user role.

1.4          Component

 Working with components organizes the application and also divides the application into reusable units. Components provide encapsulation. The Outside world has no knowledge about the objects in a component. In EP mostly classes are embedded in Netweaver component. These classes are not visible to outside user. These classes are only visible to outside user if they are added in public part of component.

Now a portal component is a Java class written and packaged specifically to run in the portal.

1.5          Java API 

First of all why we need to know about API. The answer is, it is required to add functionalities in our netweaver applications. Here we are concerned mostly about EP development using Java.  

Java API has a list of all Java packages, classes, and interfaces; along with all of their methods, fields and constructors; and also with information on how to use them.

For developing enterprise portals through SAP Netweaver using JAVA we need to use the packages, classes or interfaces provided in the API. 

There are various APIs provided by SAP to help in development of Netweaver applications using JAVA. 

Here I will try to discuss Enterprise Portal APIs. They are used in development of enterprise portals. 

The following three APIs are most commonly used while developing an Enterprise portal:-

1. Enterprise Portal (Enterprise Portal Runtime and Services API)

2. PCD (Portal Content Directory API)

3. HTMLB (HTML Business for Java API) 

There are various packages in Enterprise Portal API which provides classes and interfaces for implementing Portal runtime, Page builders, wizards , dynamic system resolutions etc. 

We will discuss few useful classes and interfaces generally used in EP development.

Interface IPortalComponent 

It is present in package com.sapportals.portal.prt.component 

All Portal Components implement this interface either directly, or more commonly by extending a class that implements this interface. 

It is implemented by class AbstractPortalComponent class. 

This interface contains 3 methods :

1. init() - The container calls the init method each time this Portal Component is loaded in memory. It is deprecated in the new versions.

2. destroy() - The destroy method is called each time the PRT (Portal Builder Runtime) decides to discard this component. After this garbage collector comes into action.

3. service() - This method is called for each request that the Portal builder runtime routes to an instance of Portal Component. Multiple threads may be executing within the service at any time. It processes the clients requests. An implementation of the IPortalComponent interface can have access to the request and the type of request sent by the client.

public void service(IPortalComponentRequest  request, IPortalComponentResponse response)  throws PortalComponentException   

request parameter – client’s request

response parameter- server’s response

Class AbstractPortalComponent

It is present in package com.sapportals.portal.prt.component 

AbstratPortalComponent  class implements following interfaces :

• IEventListenerComponent

• IPortalComponent

• IPortalComponentInit

It provides portal Edit, Help etc modes.

For this it has many methods like doHandleEditData(), doHelp(), doPreview() and many other methods.

2           Creating a simple portal application project

We will create a simple portal application project and then we will use this project to create iView, page and roles on EP.

2.1          Create a Portal Application Project

Open Netweaver.

Click the Create Portal Application Project icon or use menu path. 

File -> New -> Other -> Portal Application -> Create Portal Application Project 

Enter name of project and directory where you want to store the project and click Finish. 

Now click on icon Create Portal Application Objects 

Now select the project you created and click next. 

Click here to continue....