One of the guiding principles with WebCenter Content has been to make it as easy as possible to consume content.  And part of that means viewing content in a format that is optimal for the end user… regardless of the format the content was created in.  So WebCenter Content has a long history of converting files from one format to another.  Often this involves converting a proprietary desktop publishing format to something more open that can be viewed directly from a browser.  Or taking a high resolution image and creating a rendition that download quickly over a slow network.

Over the life of the product, the types and methods for those conversions has grown to provide a broad range of options.  It’s sometimes confusing to know what conversion are available and where exactly they are done (Content Server or Inbound Refinery), so I've put together a flowchart and list describing all of the different types of conversion, how and where they are done, and the pros and cons of each.  This list covers what’s available as of the current release – WebCenter Content 11g PS5.

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The use of a Web Tier is always recommended in a production environment, for security, performance and better control and load management, no matter if is a Intranet, internet or extranet environment.

The most common use for the Web Tier with WebCenter is acting as Reverse Proxy to forward all requests to a frontend WebCenter site to the application server (Figure A), but there’s to many ways to do an enterprise deployment with a web tier and many flavors of web servers and load balancing options.

Let’s start with the WebLogic plugin with supported webservers. You can found the standard plugins in your WebLogic instalation dir, that will something like “%WEBLOGIC_HOME%/server/plugin/%OS%/”, but I recommend you to download the latest plugin from Oracle’s OTN or eDelivery websites, you will found the Oracle WebLogic Server Web Server Plugins 1.1 or later. With the version 1.1 you will found plugins for Apache 2.2.x (32-Bits and 64-Bits) and for IIS 6+ and IIS 7+. Always confirm the OS support with the WLS Plugin Support Matrix. If you need support for iPlanet 6+ or 7+, you can use the version 1.0. Any throuble to found the files, try search or create to the Oracle support (Ref.: Doc ID 1111903.1).

Some times you do not want to use a separate web server, you can use the WebLogic as a Web Server by using a servlet, but this is subject for another post.

When you are deploying a WebCenter solution using a proxy server, you need to remember to proxy all your requests from all weblogics for Security, performance and Control and also all non-weblogic requests such as static files, WebCenter Content custom requests, Services, Portlets and 3rd Party.

Is common in intranet deployments you see calls direct to the application servers, calls to several different servers, like the Figure C.

Above you can see the same sample with all calls using the web server, for proxy forward, for reverse proxy, static files caching, even the use of Oracle Coherence is easy when you have a WebCenter Spaces + Content deployment.

We cannot forget to talk about the clustering and load balancers, Clustering is easy done by the WebLogic, you just need to follow the documentation. For Load balancing you need to choose what kind and what load balancer you will use.

LOAD BALANCING

You can do load balancing using the Web Proxy Server with WLS Plugin or a servlet as mentioned above or a External Load Balancer (Hardware) or Appliance.

Using the WLS Plugin you will need to remember to create a entry for WebCenter Server that are you using, that means that you need to create a entry for the /webcenter/ another for the /cs/, another for the “custom sitestudio” calls, for the portlets (If you do not create a parent folder for the portlets, you will need to create a entry for each portlet) and an entry for any other 3rd calls.

The configuration file for each entry will looks like this sample for IIS7:

# Changed by Oracle A-Team (Adao.Junior)

# Date: 07/31/2011

# WebCenter Content: CUSTOMER_WEB_SERVER

# WLSPlugin1.1-IIS6-IIS7-win64-x64

WebLogicCluster=192.168.100.101:8888,192.168.100.102:8888,192.168.100.101:8891,192.168.100.102:8891

ConnectTimeoutSecs=25

ConnectRetrySecs=5

KeepAliveEnabled=true

FileCaching=ON

SecureProxy=OFF

Debug=OFF

WLTempDir=C:\DEBUG\CONTENT

For a External Load Balancer (Hardware) you have many options, such as the f5 Big-IP, a guide to help you deploy with WebCenter could be found here.

There’s a option to use a hybrid configuration, with Hardware loadbalancers and Web Proxy to handle the web calls between the users and web farms, and web proxies and between the proxies and applications servers.

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One of the great features of WebCenter Content is the ability to convert many different formats of desktop publishing documents into HTML.  It uses the Dynamic Converter feature to convert native formats into very controlled HTML using well-defined conversion templates.  I’ve covered some creative ways to use this conversion before such as using the jQuery Data Table plug-in.

Well, when using Content Presenter in WebCenter Spaces and Portal, it doesn’t inherently use Dynamic Converter.  If you select a native document such as a Microsoft Word document, it will use one of the default templates such as the ‘Default View’ where it will display the document details and a link to download the document.

And if you create a standard Content Presenter template, it’s only going to let you display the metadata for the document.  If it was a data file, it would know how to pull in the XML elements.  But with a native Word document, none of the content is going to come through.

So the way around this is to have a Content Presenter template that calls a Site Studio Region Template that is designed to do the dynamic conversion on the document.  The following are the steps to set this up.

1. In Site Studio Designer, create a Conversion Definition asset and add a conversion.

   The conversion can be simple which is what I describe as a “best guess” type of conversion to HTML.  Or you can specifically pick a dynamic converter Rule that’s been established or you can pick the specific GUI and Layout templates to use.

2. Create a Region Definition.  The Region Definition does not need any elements.  It’s only needed so that the Region Template can be created.

3. Create a Region Template based on the Region Definition.  In the Region Template, add this code to use the Conversion Definition to do the dynamic conversion to HTML:

   <!--$wcmDynamicConversion("Basic","conversionsDefinitionDocName=CD_MAIN")-->

   Notice that the first parameter references the conversion name from our definition.  And the second parameter references the Content ID of our Conversion Definition.  Also make note of the Content ID of the Region Template.  That will be referenced in the next step.

   Because of an issue with translating the paths to images that may be in the native document and exported, client scripting can be used to resolve the correct paths.  This is what should be added below the dynamic conversion line:

   <script src="https://ajax.googleapis.com/ajax/libs/jquery/1.7.1/jquery.min.js"></script>
   <script type='text/javascript'>
        var baseUrl = '<!--$if isTrue(UseSSL)-->https://<!--$else-->http://<!--$endif--><!--$HttpServerAddress--><!--$HttpWebRoot-->';
       <!--$finishPath=strSubstring(outputDirectory, strIndexOf(outputDirectory, 'weblayout')+10)-->
       var weblayoutPath<!--$targetdID--> = '<!--$finishPath-->';
       $(window).load(function() {
             // Handler for .load() called.
           $('img[src*="<!--$targetdID-->"]').each(function(i) {
               var src = $(this).attr("src");
               var totalLength = src.length;
               var imageFileName = src.substring(23,totalLength-3);
               $(this).attr("src", baseUrl + weblayoutPath<!--$targetdID--> + imageFileName);
           });
       });    
   </script>

   This script will loop through all of the img tags within the converted document and replace them with the proper URL to the converted image.

4. Now in JDeveloper, create a WebCenter Portal application and create a Content Presenter template.   This is done by creating JSF Page Fragment.  Enter this for the code:

   <?xml version='1.0' encoding='UTF-8'?>
   <jsp:root version="2.1" xmlns:jsp="http://java.sun.com/JSP/Page"             xmlns:af="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/faces/rich"
   xmlns:dt="http://xmlns.oracle.com/webcenter/content/templates" xmlns:cmf="http://xmlns.oracle.com/webcenter/content/faces" xmlns:f="http://java.sun.com/jsf/core">
    <dt:contentTemplateDef var="node">
   <af:panelGroupLayout layout="scroll" id="regionDefPanel"
                                       rendered="#{(not empty node.primaryProperty) }">
       <dt:contentTemplate node="#{node}" id="docNameText" view="RT_NATIVE_DOCUMENT" regionTemplate="true"/>
   </af:panelGroupLayout>
   </dt:contentTemplateDef>
   </jsp:root>

   Notice that the view parameter for dt:contentTemplate is set to the Content ID of the Region Template created in the step prior.  This will render the content using the Region Template.  You will also want to establish the Page Data Binding Definition in order to export the resource.

5. Create a Portal Resource from in.  For the Content Repository Name and Content Type, leave these as wildcards.  If you try to associate these to the Region Definition, Content Presenter will assume the file is a data file and not work correctly.

6. Export the template as a portal resource.

7. In WebCenter's Administration -> Resources, import as a Content Presenter resource.  Then set it to be Shown.

8. Now when you Browse to your native document in Content Presenter, you can select the ‘NativeDocument’ template for display.

That's it.  Now when you page is rendered, you should now see the HTML version of your document displayed in your Content Presenter taskflow.

With WebCenter Content 11g, the Inbound Refinery handles image conversions with a built-in copy of the Oracle Outside In technology.  This provides a nice basic way of doing image conversions without any extra installation or configuration steps.  But in UCM 10g, there was no built-in conversion offered, so image converters (such as Image Alchemy or ImageMagick) were always necessary.

While the built-in converter can do some basic conversion functions such as manipulating sizes and formats, to do more advanced changes you still might need a 3rd party product such as Adobe Photoshop, Helios Image Server, or NConvert.  And to integrate to those 3rd party converters, you need extra components that is not installed directly with WebCenter Content.