Sunday, August 29, 2010

Migrating User Personalizations and Customizations in WebCenter Spaces

Each time when you extend WebCenter Spaces, previously done user personalizations and customizations are lost for obvious reasons - new WebCenter Spaces library is deployed and MDS is refreshed. Even user Group Space membership will be removed - default WebCenter Spaces screen:


Of course, we need to preserve user personalizations and customizations, we can't just extend and ask users to start once again from the beginning. We can achieve this with Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g, it allows us to export and import WebCenter Spaces application. Export and import includes user personalizations/customizations, security and services configurations - thats very helpful, it allows to create WebCenter Spaces backups and apply them later to restore WebCenter Spaces state. In order to run Export/Import, go to WebCenter Spaces application accessible from Oracle Enterprise Manager 11g and invoke it from the menu:


In my specific use case, I was extending WebCenter Spaces with custom ADF Task Flows. When extended WebCenter Spaces library was deployed, I have imported WebCenter Spaces application backup (of course you shouldn't forget to export it before extending WebCenter Spaces :) ) with all personalizations/customizations, service configurations and security settings:


Import is in progress:


Finished successfully:


User redsam1 opens WebCenter Spaces, when it was extended and backup applied:


User personalizations and customizations remain present, also Group Spaces are available as it was before extending WebCenter Spaces:


If we would take a look into custom Resource Catalog, we would see one more custom ADF Task Flow added - Employees by Departments:


This means we have successfully extended WebCenter Spaces and preserved previous setup by exporting and importing it through Oracle Enterprise Manager.

Both custom ADF Task Flows can be added now to user space:

5 comments:

Zee said...

Hi andre,

Nice post.

Which laptop you are using to work with all adf/webcenter suite for optimal speed?

Andrej Baranovskij said...

Hi,

I'm using Apple Mac Book Pro:

8 GB RAM
i5 Intel 2.63 GHz
250 GB Solid State Drive

Regards,
Andrejus

Dhiraj A. Deshmukh said...

Hi Andre

Can I have same/similar function of exporting WebCenter user preferences for custom WebCenter application.

Thanks in advance
Dhiraj Deshmukh

Andrej Baranovskij said...

Hi,

In WebCenter application you can backup only MDS schema.

Regards,
Andrejus

Anonymous said...

Hi Andrejus,

nice information. I have a query, is it possible to access the space metadata and custom attributes by skipping Spaces API WS calls.
Like accessing fro DB etc.

These calls turned out to be expensive at large space member count.


Gowtham J