Oracle Portal 10.1.4 or 10.1.4.1 Upgrade to 10.1.4.2 – Features and Bug Fixes

AshokTechnical Tips4 Comments

You may have applied or are considering applying the Oracle Application Server 10.1.2.3 patch for a variety of reasons. As a result, if you are running Oracle Portal 10.1.4 or 10.1.4.1, your Portal will be upgraded to 10.1.4.2.

Portal 10.1.4.2 New Features

There isn’t much to be found in terms of documented new features for Portal 10.1.4.2, but I understand the following to be new to this release:

  • Portal Repository JSR-170 adapter
  • You can now copy pages across page groups
  • New HTML DOCTYPE specification

Portal 10.1.4.2 Bug Fixes

Of the many bug fixes documented for Oracle AS 10.1.2.3 and Portal 10.1.4.2, following are just a few that you might be pleased about:

  • Omniportlet onclick was still opening the link in the same browser window.
  • Customize/Personalize links on a portlet were accessible even after the Global Inactivity Timeout has occurred.
  • When a WSRP portlet tried to upload content of size > 64k as multipart request, then an error was displayed saying > 64K is being uploaded.
  • All old-style URLs may now be redirected directly to the new URL without going via the splash screen.
  • More in the full article…

Flash-Based Oracle MetaLink Sucks

AshokTechnical Tips4 Comments

I am a big fan of RIA, Flex, and Flash UIs in general. So, why do I feel that the flash-based version of Oracle MetaLink sucks? Here is a quick top 5: I usually develop on a machine other than my own: using remote desktop with anything flash-based is fairly useless in my experience. Waiting for animations to refresh on the screen is dreadful. I have more problems. I can’t say I liked the UI of the old MetaLink, but my experience was consistent and stable. I end up having to log-in more with the Flash version…rarely, but randomly…while I … Read More

Escalate Oracle SR (TAR) – How To

AshokTechnical Tips2 Comments

I’m not sure why, but I find myself having to do this quite often these days; not so much to actually escalate the severity of tickets, but just to get some more responsiveness. Has anyone else noticed a general slow down from Oracle Support as of recently?

I thought I would note the phone steps for escalation to make it easy for people. Between escalation through support and the various channels we have with Oracle, we have become very good at getting issues to resolution very quickly.

…details are provided in the full article

So, as an example, I recently dialed: 800-223-1711, 1, 1, 1, 1, 999999#

Preventing sensitive information from populating form field history: cross-browser solution

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When you have users submitting sensitive information on your website while on a public computer, how can you ensure that the next person to use that public computer does not see previous user’s sensitive information? To be clear, this is the type of thing we’re trying to prevent:

form_input_history

Most of the time, the browser on that public computer should be locked down to the point where the form history is not saved. But that’s leaving it up to each browser + security policy, and it’s not exactly the “cutting it off at the source” kind of solution that would be ideal.

A common approach to solve this problem is to randomize the name of the form field input. i.e. append a random integer from 1-9999999 to the name of the form field input you’d like to protect when the page is loaded, and then subsequently handle that new random field name in the backend. That way each time you visit the page, the form input field appears to be new since it (likely) has a unique name and therefore no form history. However, this may require significant workaround if you are using a backend framework to handle this approach.

This article covers a cross-browser solution that will nip that sensitive info in the bud.

CSS Dies in the Enterprise. Why!?

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We have been implementing CSS-based web layouts and designs for years now, for all of our clients. However, it continues to amaze us how many new implementations we walk into in the enterprise space that are very heavy with HTML layouts, and many of the implementations make simply no use at all of CSS.

I’d be happy to hear an argument the other way, but I believe CSS has more than proven itslef and solidified its prominent place in the web world. The fact is, in appearance, function, development time, and maintenance without CSS, I wouldn’t even bother mentioning it.

alter table, add column – Oracle Example Syntax

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Following is simple example syntax for adding a column to an Oracle table using “alter table” SQL: 1 2 ALTER TABLE [my_table_name] ADD [my_column_name] [my_data_type];ALTER TABLE [my_table_name] ADD [my_column_name] [my_data_type]; A simple example would be: 1 2 ALTER TABLE employee ADD tps_reports_completed NUMBER;ALTER TABLE employee ADD tps_reports_completed number;

Oracle ADF Faces 10g: Accessibility and 508 Compliance

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ADF Faces provides strong support for Accessibility and 508 Compliance. Most ADF Faces components have attributes that will translate to tags that screen readers can interpret. For example, <af:input>has an attribute shortDesc for a short description; this translates to an html alt tag, which is readable by most screen readers. You can find Oracle’s Accessibility guidelines for ADF Faces here: http://www.oracle.com/webapps/online-help/jdeveloper/10.1.3/state?navSetId=_&navId=4&vtTopicFile=jsf_apps/adfcreate/af_aacessible.html&vtTopicId