Portal Tutorial - Getting Started

Introduction

The first thing we are going to do is to create a new page group. I normally do this from the navigator window. You can switch to the navigator by click on the navigator link on the top right of the screen after you've logged in.

The layout of Portal takes a little getting used to, but it's actually very logical. At the top of the page you have three tabs: One for putting togther the pages (Page Groups), one for creating portlets or components that make up the pages (Providers) and one for the database schema (Database Objects).

On each tab you are presented with a list of things. If you are allowed to create these things, then above the list is a link (or sometimes several) to a wizard that will take you through the steps necessary to create another object.

Alongside each item you will see a list of links which allow you to work with that item.

Creating a Page Group

We're going to create a new Page Group, so click on that link (above the list of existing Page Groups). Enter the following details:

Once you click Ok the 'root' page of the new Demo page group will be displayed. It's displayed in edit mode. Note the &_mode=16 parameter at the end of the url - you can enter this yourself at any time in a portal page if you have the right permissions.

We have found it good practice to give each Portal application it's own Schema in Portal and it's own database provider. It keeps each application independant, making it easier to transfer it from a development environment to test or production. So lets create these for our application.

Creating a Schema

Click on the Database Objects tab and the New Schema link at the top of the page. Enter DEMO for the schema name and a password of you're choosing. Assigning a password to a schema is not essential, but it does make life a lot easier for the developer as it allows you to log into the database as the schema owner and edit the packages directly.

Once you have clicked on this, Portal seems to expect you to want to create another schema. Just click on close. While we are on the database tab we can make sure that DEMO has the rights to the two tables in the SCOTT schema that we are going to need. Navigate up to the list of all schemas and scroll down to SCOTT. Click on this to look inside. You should see the tables EMP and DEPT listed amongst some other objects. Click on the Access link beside EMP and grant DEMO user SELECT, INSERT, UPDATE and DELETE rights:

Do the same for the DEPT table. Now we can set up a database provider for our application. Click on the Providers tab and then choose Database Provider from the list. Choose to create a new database provider and enter DEMO for the name, Demo for the Display name and choose DEMO from the drop down list of schemas:

Congratulations: you now have a new page group with it's own schema and development environment all set up and ready. In the next lesson we'll create our first dynamic page.