XMLAccess and WPS

Last time, I talked about the Release process for WPS using XMLAccess as the tool, here. Now, I going for more details on the XMLAccess to help gain an indepth understanding of the tool.

Why use XMLAccess
The major benefit of XMLAccess is its ability to update pages and portlets without losing user customization. If you perform your updates via XMLAccess, any user customization to a page or a portlet is retained because the object IDs are retained.

For example, the organization may have deployed a stock portlet that the user can customize to monitor certain stocks by adding just those stocks to the portlet. If you update this portlet, you do not want the user customization to be lost. The XMLAccess tool allows you to maintain the user’s customization. When exporting and importing via the XMLAccess tool, the object IDs of the portlet application are maintained. When a user customizes a portlet or a page, these customizations are stored in your back-end database. All these customizations are stored relative to the actual portlet application. The key that ties all of these customized versions of a portlet or page back to its parent is the object ID.

How XMLAccess works
The XMLAccess command line client is a small separate program that connects to the server using an HTTP connection, which allows you to configure the Portal remotely. The XMLAccess command is located in the wp root/bin directory of the Portal server and is xmlaccess.bat (on Windows) or xmlaccess.sh.

The syntax for the command is as follows:

xmlaccess -user wpsadmin -pwd itso -in file.xml -out result.xml -url myhost:9082/wps/config

In the command line, use the following file names:

* file.xml: The name of a file containing the XML request (configuration export or update) that should be processed.

* result.xml: The name of the result file containing the XML output (configuration export). You can later use that file to re-import the exported configuration.

* url: The URL to access the Portal configuration servlet. This URL consists of the Portal host name, the base Uniform Resource Identifier for the Portal, as specified during installation (for example /wps), and the servlet extension /config.

You can use the XMLAccess tool to transfer a complete configuration, including:
* Portlets
* Access Control List
* Portal Web application configurations (portlet applications)
* Portal skin definitions
* Portal theme definitions
* Portal portlet configurations
* Portal site map (pages, labels, and links)
* Portal URL mappings

With the XMLAccess tool, you can also:
* Load the WebSphere Portal default portlets configuration during the initial install and transfer parts of Portal configuration.
* Create and modify existing Portal artifacts incremental releases.
* Delete Portal artifacts. However, you must manually add delete commands to the input file. Keep in mind, although the XMLAccess tool is a bulk transfer utility, the command does not know history. It only knows the Portal configuration at specific point in time.

Filed in: WPS