Oracle WebCenter Portal OOB taskflows and page fragments can be customized to meet your specific requirements. This work is done using JDeveloper and we can commit these customizations in Source Control, so that we can easily track changes over time and if needed revert back to previous revision. I will demonstrate process to automatically build artifact for promoting these customizations to various environments. We will utilize JDeveloper deployment profile concepts for this automation.
You first need to build a new JDeveloper application for customizations.
Once created this application is ready for you to start customizations, and it comes with metadata deployment profile that generates metadata.mar file in deploy sub-folder of application root folder.
But metadata (MAR) profile can only be executed in JDeveloper, so when we run this from FlexDeploy (using ojdeploy), it will fail. In order to automate this, we will create dummy WAR and EAR profiles as shown below. Now we will be able to run EAR deployment profile using ojdeploy which will generate .ear, .war and .mar files, but we will just capture .mar file to promote customizations through various environments.
In order to customize taskflows and page fragments, you need to start JDeveloper in customization mode.
Now let’s build FlexDeploy workflow. As good practice, checkout source code from Source Control (Subversion in this example) and tag checked out source. So now we will have Subversion revision tagged with FlexDeploy project version.
Next step is to run JDeveloper plugin’s Application Build operation. Specify where source is checked out from Subversion and indicate mar for FDJDEV_INP_SAVE_ARTIFACTS_EXTENSIONS, so that at the end of plugin execution, .mar file will be copied to artifacts.
Now just like any other FlexDeploy project, Submit build request and you can see execution steps and logs.
Also, see metadata.mar file saved in FlexDeploy artifacts repository at the end of successful build workflow execution.
You can also setup Continuous Integration (Scheduled Build, Polling interval Build) to further automate Build operation. In next part, i will show how to automate deployment of these customizations to WebCenter Portal Server.