Consuming External Web Services in UCM11g

In our project, we were trying to consume external web services from a component in UCM 11g but were unsuccessful for a long time.

The component in 10g to consume web services was working very well but when upgraded to 11g, this component was not working.

In 10g, we bundled the stub classes as a jar and deployed it as part of custom component ($Component/lib). When this component was deployed in 11g, we were getting the below error.

Illegal Argument Exception..............
Interface not visible from class loader.

It was clear from the error that the stub classes are not loaded to the correct class loader.

Finally we achieved it by placing the stub jar in the $DOMAIN_DIR/lib folder where $DOMAIN_DIR is the UCM Domain. Then removed the jar from the component and its class path and restarted and then it started working.

If there is a better solution to the problem, please leave your suggestions as comments.

Content Server won't start with CSDS failing to get initialized in UCM 11g

Recently I got the below error, because of which my managed server (content server) in UCM 11g was getting started with errors but the application won't come up.

Failed to initialize the application 'CSDS' due to error com.rsa.jsafe.JSAFE_PaddingException: Could not perform unpadding: invalid pad byte..

CSDS is the datasource for the DB that UCM connects to. The CSDS datasource configuration and test connection can be done from the Weblogic Server(WLS) console.

The configuration for CSDS that is viewed through the WLS console is stored in the file
cs-ds-jdbc.xml

The file is located in the below path
$MiddlewareHOME/user_projects/domains/YOUR_DOMAIN/config/jdbc/cs-ds-jdbc.xml

The above mentioned error is due to the encrypted password getting corrupted and to resolve it just replace the encrypted password with its corresponding clear text value in the file cs-ds-jdbc.xml

The password is the schema password to connect to the UCM schema.

Then restart the server, it should start without any errors and the application should come up.

Hope this helps someone.

Javascript undefined error when using wwStrings in UCM 11g

A javascript error is thrown in UCM 11g when wwStrings is used in javascript as in 10g like wwStrings["someString"].

This is because in UCM 11g, wwStrings is moved to the namespace idc.string.wwStrings

So the syntax in UCM 11g to access the strings in javascript is lc("someString") .

It took all day long for me to figure out this.

Creating custom menu items in Oracle UCM 11g

A lot of things have changed in UCM 11g, and there is not much documentation or article on how to make things work as it did in UCM 10g.

One such thing is creating custom menu items in Oracle UCM 11g.

CoreMenutItems and CoreMenuItemRelationships resources are used to introduce menu items. Below is a sample code on how to get it done.

<@dynamicdata CoreMenuItems@>
id, label, linkType, linkData
MY_SEARCH, My Custom Search, cgi, IdcService=CUSTOM_SEARCH_SERVICE
<@end@>

<@dynamicdata CoreMenuItemRelationships@>
parentId, id, loadOrder
MENU_A, MY_SEARCH, 30
<@end@>

Keep checking this space, I will try to bring some more tips on how to achieve
few more things in UCM 11g.