DPM for WebSphere Portal best practice 1 - Portal page for both anonymous/authenticate user and WebSphere portal implicit logout

VILT and Vignette provides Dynamic Portal Module (DPM) for Third Party Portals for clients of WebSphere Portal, Oracle WebCenter Interaction and liferay, this saves a lot of time for delivery VCM content on third party portal. However, DPM is originally for Vignette portal, there are a lot features are unavailable for DPM for third parties, like HPD, Ajax render, and there are some issues requireing re-developement to adopt end user's requirement. We are going to focus on DPM for WebSphere portal and try to share some experiences.

 

Portal page for both anonymous/authenticate user and WebSphere portal implicit logout filter.

 

Use Case: a public page need to be accessable for both public users(anonymous) and internal users(authenticated portal users) with same WebSphere portal friend url.

 

WebSphere portal friendly url has different sub context for authenticate user and anonymous, defaultly it is wps/myportal for private and wps/portal for public portal pages, although these context and sub-context are configurable, but it is not possible to make authenticate users and anonymous use same sub context, when I try to configure anonymous use same sub context as authenticate users, anonymous automatically get access to authencate user's home page.

 

DPM only allow one websphere portal friendly url to be configured in per presentation template, in this case, if you try design a portal site for both authenticate and anonymous user, you are going to have trouble. If you configure it as /wps/myportal/***** in presentation template, then anonymous users have no access to this page; if you configure it as /wps/portal, both anonymous and authenticate users are able to access it, but when authenticate users try to access a websphere portal public page, websphere portal default action is to do a implicit log out to this user, and forward him to default page of public page, then every time when a websphere portal authenticate user try to access the public page, he would be implicit logout and forwarded to the default public page(portal log in page).

 

To solve this issue, our design is to develope and customized implicit log out filter, when the authenticate users are triggered to be implicit logout, keep this user be implicit logout, but forward him to the original public page he request instead of going to the default public page. With the cutomized implicit log out filter, anonymous access to public page has nothing to be changed, authenticate user would be implict log out then get to the public page he request.