Had a great week of on-site training with Jason Stortz as our instructor. I have to give two big thumbs up, as the training Jason provided was both tailored to our needs, and the amount of knowledge that he brings is inspiring.
What was the biggest take away?
Creating components in Java was really simple and powerful. The examples found at HowToComponentsBundle are a must have. Setting up JDeveloper to build the class files was really easy. There is a tutorial on building components. Unfortunately, the only source was on metalink. If you have access, go to community/Middleware/Universal Content Management – Then look in the popular documents section.
Other important notes: Repeating the mantra, “You need a component to do that” was the phrase of the week. With training, you realize that UCM is like many other Oracle products. You purchase a very base model, but get tools that, once you learn them, have the capability to get the job done. You have to think in UCM. This means that you need to learn IDocScript, and follow the component model system to get the functionality you need. So, what does that mean? Simple, you need a component to do that!
To give you an example. We have lots of documents that we need to import, but a large percentage of these documents have spaces in them. By using a little IDocScript and the RemoveWs function in the batch uploader, we were able to upload the documents with name without spaces. Now when we link to this content from our web server, we don’t have to deal with spaces and encoding links.
In order to get check-in documents to be space free, we created a component that removed spaces from the Original Name during the check-in. We were able to create a component using two lines of Java code to get this done. Of course there is more to it than this. Setting up a component to call the java code was done with the component manager, and we used one of the components found in the howto bundle as a template. We also needed to know what event to hook into. As you can see, a lot of setup just to get two lines of code to get the job done.
I will try to add more code that is UCM based as that is the direction my employer is taking. There seems to be a dearth of documentation on “How To” with UCM. Even though Bex’s Book is very helpful, more is needed!