WebCenter PS3 Navigation Model - Menu Out Of The Box

With the new release of JDeveloper - PS3, we can install WebCenter PS3 extensions (use Check for Updates, see here). There are tons of new features, and bugs also? Let's hope that no :) Product is definitely improving with new features and becoming really attractive. New term is introduced - WebCenter Portal Framework application. This means we are not building anymore just WebCenter applications based on ADF framework. We are implementing portals ! Sounds inspiring - too good to be true? :) Well we will see, how stable this product will be - I will cover many topics from functionality to performance, in my future posts. Seems like lots of material for blogging this year ! :) On positive note - remember early ADF 11g TP releases, it takes time to make it solid. Now we can work with really stable framework.

Today I will start with easy topic - introduce WebCenter PS3 Navigation Model. Remember those times when we were implementing database driven dynamic menus ? Good - now you can forget it, now we have declarative dynamic menu provided by WebCenter PS3. One of the key things - its not limited to work only with one type of content. It supports everything - pages, ADF task flows, UCM content, external Web pages. Please read - Building a Navigation Model for Your Portal and Visualizing Your Portal Navigation from WebCenter PS3 developer guide. Its very useful to be aware of different options for Expression Language related to navigation.

Download sample application - EnterprisePortalApp.zip. This application is created as WebCenter Portal Application:

Wizard will guide you through application setup steps - Portal creation:

Make sure you configure your application with standard Portal features in the same wizard (otherwise forget it to make it working right):

WebCenter Portal application is generated without Model project. I have created one manually and implemented ADF BC objects:

Portal project contains predefine folder structure - don't touch it, it should stay like that. In order to be able to consume all WebCenter Portal Framework features, you should create your components inside that structure as well. For example, I have created ADF task flow with fragment:

You should create ADF task flow inside predefined folder structure. Same applied for JSF fragments:

In order to define menu model, open default-navigation-model.xml file, add menu items there:

You can point to different targets, external pages, ADF task flows or other resources. Here I'm pointing to ADF task flow:

This simple application will work with anonymous access, we will not test security model now (new pages hierarchy wizard):

Anonymous role is granted to the ADF task flow as well:

From ADF Faces page we are simply referencing navigation model and rendering menu nodes:

You should keep in mind that WebCenter Portal Application entry file is index.html:

Right click on Portal project and choose Run:

WebCenter Portal Application screen will be rendered - default menu defined in default-navigation-model.xml file is rendered as well:

Click on Oracle menu item - external page is rendered inside ADF page automatically:

Same works for the second menu item:

Third link brings ADF task flow and allows to update information retrieved from database: