What's New in the Portal for 7.0 SP13

[Dan_Wroblewski]

We're back, as usual, with each release of SAP NetWeaver to discuss the latest and greatest portal features, this time for SAP NetWeaver 7.0 SP Stack 13. Some are small and cosmetic, others are more substantial, but hopefully all will be useful to you.

So here goes, in no particular order:

• Navigation Zoom: You can now designate a navigation node to zoom when clicked, meaning that the current navigation hierarchy disappears and the children of the clicked node become the top-level nodes.
  
  For example, I created a role (MyRole) with a workset (MyWS) and two worksets inside this workset: MyWS-2 (a navigation zoom point) and PlainWS. When displayed in the portal, the navigation zoom node is displayed with an arrow inside the folder.
  
  
  
  
  When you click on the node, the navigation is reset and starts from the children of the clicked node:
  
  
  
  A link (Back to main portal) is provided to return to the regular navigation.
  
  For more information, see Configuring Navigation Zoom.
   
• Indexing Portal Content: This feature, known internally as the Portal Spider, enables indexing of portal content via the standard KM/TREX search bar at the top of the portal.
  
  The secret to all this is a new portal component that can take a navigation node and, instead of displaying the regular markup, returns indexable text that a search crawler can understand. If the node is a role, workset or page, it returns text related to meta-attributes of the object, as well as links to worksets, pages and iViews inside, so these can be indexed as well.
  
  This component also enables you to have your external facing portal indexed by external crawlers by supplying a special URL to the crawler. You can also choose to only index a subset of roles.
  
  Up until now, you could either do a KM search (which did not include portal content) or you could search the PCD (which did not include the content within pages, and also did not let you to search for iViews within pages). The point is that there was no search of the content in the portal.
  
  If you do not have KM installed, an iView template is provided to create a search iView for portal content.
  
  For more information, see Indexing Portal Content.
   
• URL iView: The URL iView now enables you to send dynamic parameters based on the current user, or parameters based on system information, such as the server name or port number.
  
  For example, you may have a web site to which you want to create a URL iView, and which accepts a language parameter to set the language. You could get the language for the current user and pass it as a URL parameter.
  
  
  
  Originally, the URL iView was meant for simple static pages, and could only send static parameters. Later, the current user and the user's password could also be sent. Now, other attributes of the current user can be sent, or details about the current portal installation.
  
  For more information, see Configuring URL Parameters.
   
• Desktop Title: The browser title of the portal is the current page, followed by a string that is set by a PRT property. You can now set the title with a property in the framework page and, naturally, set different titles for different framework pages.
  
  The following shows the Desktop Title property in the property editor for the default framework page:
  
  
  
  The value then appears in the browser title:
  
  
  
  For more information, see Creating and Editing a Portal Desktop.
   
• Highlight DTN Row: A small cosmetic feature enables you to highlight the row of the selected navigation node in the detailed navigation.
  
  
  
  Up until now, only the word was highlighted. Highlighting the entire row makes it easier to pick out the highlighted node, and makes the look more uniform.
  
  You can specify the background color of the highlight, by setting the Background Color of the Selected Node property in Navigation Panel --> Detailed Navigation list.
  
  For more information, see Features Enabled Through DTN Properties.
   
• Service Map Pictograms: You can now specify that the icons (pictograms) also be displayed as clickable links to the listed iView. Up until now, only the name of the iView was clickable.
  
  
  
  Pictogram is Clickable is a new property on the Service Map iView.
  
  For more information, see Creating a Service Map iView.
   
• Mode Delegation in Portal Runtime: For a portal component, you can now specify more then one mode to delegate to another component. Up until now, the syntax for the delegation enabled you to specify just one mode and, then, a component for that mode.
  
  Portal components are always run under a mode, which determines which method is called during the content phase (generally it is the default mode, which calls the doContent() method).
  
  You may want to delegate to another component whenever in a particular mode.
  
  For more information, see Delegation.
   
• Transport Portal EPAs Using CTS: You can now automate the transport of portal content via CTS by creating, with the help of new tools, a DC from an EPA file. The creation of the EPA file is still a manual process using the portal transport UIs.
  
  For more information, see Karin Sudrow's blog Using the Enhanced Change and Transport System in a Portal Environment. 
   
• Navigation Web Service: You can obtain the navigation hierarchy via a Web service. This enables you to create access to portal content even when not running in a Java environment in within the same virtual machine.
  
  Currently, this is not documented, but will be fully documented by SP Stack 14.