ORA SPACE

Oracle Portal provides a deployment framework for applications based on industry standards e.g. J2EE, JSR168, WSRP etc. Oracle Portal is also used as a document management or content management solution, as a centralized store for corporate documents. This feature offers more enhancements than storing documents in network share e.g. at NTFS drive located in Windows environment. I will dedicate a separate post for comparison between Oracle Portal based document management solution and network share based document storage. One of the major enhancements is the option to search the documents or content uploaded to Oracle Portal based document repository.

In this post, I would like to highlight the options available to search the content in Oracle Portal. Following are the options to search content in Oracle Portal:

• Basic Search – Item and Portlet: This is available as a built-in item type and portlet for Page Designer/Developers. It does not provide an option to provide search operators while performing search.
• Advanced Search – Portlet: It provides additional search operators for search. It also provides an option to search based on item/document attributes e.g. search based on Author of the item/document.
• Custom Search – Portlet: In addition to features available in Advanced Search portlet, it provides an option to define the layout of Search Form and Results Page. It also allows Portlet Publishers to use separate Search Results page for each of the Custom Search portlet. Another useful feature of Custom Search is that it provides an option to automate the search action based on search term specified i.e. whenever user will access the page, Custom Search portlet will perform the search and will display the results in portlet region. For example, end user can create Custom Search portlet to show list of documents uploaded to Oracle Portal in last 7 days.

Oracle Portal search options mentioned above, provide an interface to perform search on item/document uploaded to repository. Oracle Portal Search crawls and index the content/document in Portal repository at regular interval. Oracle Portal Search uses Oracle Text for indexing of items/documents uploaded by default. Administrators can enable/disable the option to use Oracle Text for Oracle Portal search. However, if Oracle Text is disabled in Oracle Portal, search will only return results based on terms found in item/document metadata only. In order to search the content of the documents uploaded e.g. Word, Excel, Powerpoint, PDF etc. Oracle Text must be enabled.

Oracle Portal Search perform the search based on permissions available to end user i.e. users will be able to search the content/document for which he/she is authorized. Thus, it will not violate the security policy by searching the un-authorized content and returning results to users.

References:

• Oracle Text