Portlet Personalization, visibility rules using only lower case

In Websphere Portal, we want to hide some portlets in certain pages according to the user's group. Personalization function in the portal can be used for this.

I want to show the portlet if the user is in the group MYUsers. The fullname of the group is CN=MYUsers. Thus I've created a new Rule type Visibility.

Show  page or portlet when
  current Portal Users.Groups  includes  CN=MYUsers
Otherwise hide

By applying the rule to the portlet, it should hide the portlet if the login user is not in the MYUsers group. But there are some issue for the above rule. Using an LDAP browser, the group name is CN=MYUsers. But when applying it to the rule, it doesn't seem to be working.

The group name have to be set to lowercase to get it working.

Show  page or portlet when
  current Portal Users.Groups  includes  cn=myusers
Otherwise hide

The documentation does not state that the group name have to be in lowercase. Thanks to my colleague, after much trying around, he found that lowercase group name is working.

IBM Lotus Web Content Management Rendering Portlet

IBM have release an update to the Web Content Viewer portlet. You can download it from the portlet catalog.

The IBM® Lotus® Web Content Management Rendering Portlet provided with this package is a solution which updates and improves how the rendering of Web content is performed in IBM WebSphere® Portal. While the existing Web Content Viewer portlet (referred to in the WebSphere Portal documentation as a "rendering portlet") has evolved throughout several versions to implement sophisticated Web content rendering functions, it is still based on the deprecated IBM Portlet API. By contrast, the new JSR 286 Web Content Viewer has been entirely redeveloped based on the Java™ Portlet Specification 2.0 (JSR 286). In addition to the benefits afforded by JSR 286, the JSR 286 Web Content Viewer in this package also enables other features for Web content management, such as a new Web content portal page type and support for the standard search seedlist 1.0 format.

Portletize Lotus Notes Application - Part 1 (Profile Sets)

From the existing samples in Portlet Factory (PF), you can get a simple Lotus Notes (LN) application up and running in no time. I will skip the most details covered in the sample.


By using just a Domino View & Form builder, you can get the most simple function of viewing, creating, editing and deleting documents. When setting up the builder, you have to put in the property file for the Domino connection, Database Name, etc. Development and production server should have different settings.

In LN, I normally use profile document. The profile document would contain settings that is needed for the application to run. Same for PF, we can use Profile Set also. Profile Sets contains one or more profiles entries. There's a sample on PF samples page on how to use the profiles feature.


An example that we can use here is to set a profile for the Database name. In my environment, production path and development path is different. Thus for the application to run, it have to point to the correct database path. First, create a Profile Input for the Database name. If a profile set does not exist, you can create a new profile set. Then create a new Profile Entry name DatabaseName type text. I give it a default value to the development server database path.


Next is to set the entries configurable on the portal. Add in a Portlet Adapter builder to create the portlet. Then scroll down to Portlet Sets section. There should be a list of Profile Sets that is created. For those that you want to be configurable, it can be set to "Show individual profile values in Configure". You may want to check on "Require Configuration". This would force the portlet to be configured during deployed before it can be used.

I received a portlet application from a team and it needs code changes everytime it is deploy in development and production. This cause a lot of issue when they forget to make the changes. Thus using the Profile Set example above, it provides a more flexible way to deploy application to different environments.

Show-n-Tell Thursday Add to del.icio.us

Websphere Portal Server implementation

I have not been updating my blog lately. So now I'm trying to put together what I have been learning for the past 2 month. Been busy setting up the new Websphere Portal (WP) infrastructure for my company. It have been quite a long process. WP is like 1000 pieces puzzle compare to Lotus Domino 100 pieces puzzle. There are so many things to do to get a proper WP environment up and running. And there are still fine tuning to be done. Maybe we lack in experience for WP but definitely it is not a simple system to setup.

Next is the development of some portlet applications. I have familiarize myself with Portlet Factory and managed to portletize some Lotus application. In my previous job, I have created portlet using Websphere Studio Application Developer (WSAD). Definitely Portlet Factory has made it much easier to than WSAD. Almost every now and then I find some cool feature in Portlet Factory. I will share more of this in the next few writeup of how I've portletize an Lotus Application.

Through so many Lotus blogs, I have learn so much. Lotus community have been very willing to share their experience and that is great. I'm hoping to learn from Websphere Portal/Portlet Factory blogs. I did a quick search on Google for Webpshere Portal Blog and Portlet Factory Blog. What a let down. I manage to find only a handful of blogs and not all of them are updated. If you know any good Guru out there, appreciate you could leave the URL on the comments. I did a search on Lotus Notes Blog and can definitely see the big different in numbers of blogs. Hmm... do Lotus community have more time to blog? Maybe Lotus tools have make things simpler thus we have more time to blog.