Oracle Application Server Portal 10g -- Mobile Enabling OracleAS Portal
Provider Debugging Techniques: Using the Mobile Log Viewers

There are at least two mechanisms available to portlet developers to help alleviate this problem:

1. OracleAS Portal is able to capture, record and parse portlet output that is used in page assembly.
2. Developers of web providers can deploy a TCP tunnel between Portal and their provider.

This article discusses the first of these options.

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OPERATION REQUIREMENTS

To use this feature it is necessary to

• enable the logging of portlet content
• add either, or both, of the portlets that display the logged records to a page to which the users making the mobile requests being logged have access.

ENABLING LOGGING

To enable the logging of mobile portlet content, navigate to the Mobile tab of the Global Settings pages (follow the Global Settings link in the builder portlet on the "Administration" tab of the builder page) and set the Log Mobile Responses checkbox.

Note that changing the state of this checkbox modifies the page descriptions used by Portal to assemble pages. Consequently all page information in the Portal caches becomes invalid and, until the cache is populated again performance will be degraded accordingly. This is not generally a major issue on a development portal with few users who understand OracleAS Portal's dynamics, but it is probably undesirable to cause this to happen on a production system unless absolutely necessary.

RULES FOR LOGGING

The feature of recording mobile portlet content was added as an aid for mobile portlet developers, but to avoid unnecessary load on the Portal servers only mobile portlet responses are logged. More specifically, for any portlet content to be recorded the following must be satisfied:

• the Log Mobile Responses checkbox of the Mobile tab in Global Settings is set
• the user making the request is logged on
• the request is either from a mobile device and/or it is for a mobile page

Therefore the following will be logged:

• non-public access of a portlet on a mobile page being accessed from the desktop previewer
• non-public access of a portlet on a desktop page being accessed from a mobile device

Portal will only retain the five most recent records per user per portlet.

VIEWING THE LOGS

To view the recorded portlet content OracleAS Portal comes with two built-in portlets, both of which can be found in the Portal Tools folder of the portlet repository:

• "Most recent mobile log entry" shows only the most recent record for a particular user, irrespective of the portlet from which the data was recorded
• "Mobile log by portlet" offers a list of all the portlets for which a user has content recorded, the user can select which portlet's content they wish to review

Simply place the portlets onto a page that can be accessed by the same user who is performing the mobile access.

Both portlets show the following information for each portlet content record:

• the headers sent by the portlet
• the content send by the portlet
• the result of performing a validating parse of the recorded content with respect to the Oracle9iAS Wireless XML DTD

The following figure shows one each of the various contents listed above for three seperate portlet response records:

It is important to realise that portlets themselves should not render a complete Oracle9iAS Wireless XML document tree - they are not responsible for rendering the root nodes <SimpleResult> and <SimpleContainer>. The portlet content is inserted into a document rendered by Portal that already contains these elements. However, in order to validate the portlet content it is necessary to insert these root nodes prior to validation; as a result the column numbers generated by the validating parser for contents on the first line may not exactly match the location of the problem in the original portlet content. These references will not be totally misleading and the detailed messages from the parsers are of significant benefit.

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