Portal Server Configuration

Understanding the Portal Server Configuration

So far, you have seen and hopefully understood how to install and verify the WebSphere Portal server. Now you will see how the Portal server’s configuration data is stored in the default Cloudscape database and in files in the file system. If you want to configure and maintain your portal server in a production environment then you need to have a complete understanding of this configuration so pay close attention to this information.

Different parts of the configuration are stored in different schemas in the wpsdb database. The remaining part of the configuration (DB connections and Deployment Descriptors for example) will be stored as property files in the file system.

What follows is a brief description of the important schema names and the type of information that is stored in the wpsdb database schemas:

Release, Likeminds, Feedback: These schemas store data of Pages, Portlets, Portlet instances, Themes, Templates, Personalization rules and Policies. This data is not modified during the portal runtime.

Customization: This schema stores information specific to users (for example PortletData).

Community, Jcr: These schemas store data of shared documents and resources. This data will be modified during runtime.

wmm: This schema stores user registry data used to authenticate users. Having the portal configuration in the Cloudscape database is fine for education and demonstration purposes. However, this configuration data does not scale as user volume increases and does not support portal cluster configuration data or multiple realms. You need to move this configuration to a robust RDBMS (like DB2, Oracle, Sybase, MS SQL Server or Informix for example) in production environments. You also need to move user registry data from the Cloudscape database (stored in the wmm schema) to an LDAP server (like IBM Tivoli Directory Server for example) in production environments. Before re-configuring the portal configuration data, you need to understand a few important property files that play a big role while running the configuration tasks later. Immediately after the portal installation, these property files refer to the Cloudscape  database by default. To learn more about these property files and values stored inside them, perform the following steps.

Step 1: Locate the wpconfig, wpconfig_dbdomain and wpconfig_dbtype property files under <WPV6-ROOT>\config directory. These files point to portal configuration data stored in the wpsdb database in Cloudscape plus other configuration data. You need to work with these files a lot when you want to transfer data to a production quality database and LDAP server. If you can make printouts of these files, start reviewing the comments explaining each parameter.

• Make sure that you take a backup copy of these files before opening and viewing them.

• Also, pay attention to two more important files under this directory (WPSConfig.bat and wpconfig.xml). You will use WPSConfig.bat file to  run portal configuration tasks. You will work with this program when you do database and LDAP migration tasks.

Step 2: Open wpconfig_dbdomain.propertes file to find out the database type, name and other information about various database schemas where portal configuration is stored. You will find one section for each schema. The screenshot below shows the Release Database Properties section that shows that release data is stored in Cloudscape (release.DbType), the name of the database is wpsdb (release.DbName), the name of the schema is release (release.DbSchema) and various other properties related to release data.

• In the same manner, you can find database properties sections related to the Customize, Jcr, Feedback, Community and Wmm data in the same file that points to different schemas within the wpsdb Cloudscape database in the default portal configuration.

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