Portal: Data At Our Fingertips!
Session # 36746
Gail McGarry MacAulay
Tara Morgan
Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission
Florida Marine Research Institute
Today’s Presentation:
A little bit of background
Anatomy of our Data Portal
We’ll “dissect” our portal and show you how
easy it was to create some of these elements
using Portal Wizards.
Future directions
http://floridamarine.org
Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission
FLORIDA MARINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE
FL Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission’s
Florida Marine Research Institute
Conduct scientific research relating to
Florida’s marine resources
Provide research results to enhance
management of Florida’s marine resources
Computer Configuration
Oracle Database Server Oracle Database Server
Dell Power Edge 6450 Dell Power Edge 6400
Windows NT SP 4 Windows 2000 Advanced Server
4+ gb RAM 3.6 gb RAM
9iAS Infrastructure
Oracle Application Server
Dell Power Edge 2550
Windows 2000 5.0 SP 2
2.3 gb RAM
9iAS Mid-tier
Our Data Portal Concept:
• Make data and info accessible to staff
• Coordinate and promote accessibility of
data for all Programs and Assets
• Facilitate use of cross-cutting applications
• Encourage value-added use of data
• Continue to develop metadata library
FMRI’s Portal ...
• Built on Oracle’s 9i Application Server
• Developed for FMRI staff (Intranet)
• Designed to provide access to FMRI data
and other resources
• Currently being tested by a limited number
of staff
http://floridamarine.org
ANATOMY OF OUR DATA PORTAL
Let’s “dissect” our Portal into different regions, for discussion purposes …
1. Data Portal
Header
2. “Where do
you want to go?”
pane
3. “Let’s go get data” pane
Data Portal Header Pane
-- Incorporating images and URL links
Create individual portlets with
“Items” regions, add items, and then
edit the item attributes.
It’s that easy !!!
Let’s move on to our second pane --
the “Where Do You Want To Go?” pane
This pane was created using the Menu
Wizard in the Oracle9iAS Portal
Navigator page.
Using the Menu Wizard
Using the Menu Wizard, you can easily set up a list of URL
links and quickly customize the look by adding icons and
altering the font.
When you add your
new menu item in a
portlet, the links are
ready to go!
Let’s test the
“Rules & Regs”
link.
That link connects to the
Florida Administrative Code
page.
Let’s move on to our third pane –
the “Let’s go get data” pane …
This pane features
the following tabs:
Queries – retrieves
data from our
commercial fish
landings Oracle db.
Reports – generates
landings summary
reports
Links to M/S Access
– a Discoverer
portlet
Resources –
contains items
useful to our staff
Our “Queries” tab features forms, charts, and lists of values that
were all created using the Portal Wizards – Really!
CHART
LIST OF VALUES
FORM
This “master-detail form” queries two tables from our Oracle
9i database. It was created using Portal Forms Wizard.
“Instructional” text was entered in the “Header
Text” box when the form was created.
The user enters the year
and species number, then
clicks on “Query” to
retrieve data from our
Data from two tables are
commercial fish landings retrieved.
database. Note: The Query
button disappears when the data
are retrieved!
This chart displays annual landings weight summaries
from our Oracle 9i database. It was created using the
Portal Chart Wizard.
We created a dynamic “List of Values” (using
the Portal LOV Wizard) and incorporated it
into our chart to help select the species name.
Using the Portal Forms Wizard …
You’ll want to label cryptic fields
so that they make sense to your
user.
The “Reports” tab retrieves data from views in our
Oracle 9i database. Reports were created using the
Portal Reports Wizard.
The user clicks on a
summary, and a new
window pops up to display
the report.
In the Wizard, we selected the
“Reports from SQL Query”
option and used a database link
to access views containing the
landings summaries.
The “Links to M/S Access” tab is an Oracle Discoverer portlet
that retrieves workbooks/worksheets created from our
Microsoft Access data sets.
In the worksheet, the user
can decide whether to
display the data by location
or date.
The user can select the date.
Clicking on “View
Worksheet” displays the
worksheet information in a
new window.
Using Discoverer in your portal …
A cool feature of Discoverer is that
you can export worksheets to various
output formats.
If the user prefers not to view the prepared workbooks, they
can design their own queries in Discoverer!
Clicking on “Ad-hoc Queries”
launches the Oracle Discoverer
Wizard to create new
workbooks.
Using the Discoverer Wizard to Query Data
In this example, the user queries the manatee
carcass and red tide location data sets to see if
there are any co-occurrences. The query was
written from the manatee researcher’s
perspective --using the carcass location as the
linked item.
Query Result
Getting all of this to work was a little
tricky … Let’s walk through the general
steps that we followed to connect to the
Access databases, get started in
Discoverer, and then bring Discoverer
into Portal as a portlet.
General steps to set up links to
Microsoft Access data sets:
1. Set up ODBC driver on database server. Be sure to
use the “Microsoft Access Driver (*.mdb)” driver
2. Edit/create an iniths_sid.ora file
3. Edit tnsnames.ora file
4. Edit listener.ora file. Don’t forget to restart listener!
5. Set up public database link.
6. Test connection.
General steps to use Discoverer as a
portlet in Portal.
1. If you are new to Discoverer, consider running the
Discoverer tutorials – they’ll help you get a jump start
on creating something useful with your data.
2. Use Discoverer Administrator to set up end user
layers (EULs) in your Oracle database.
3. Use Discoverer Plus to create workbooks/worksheets.
4. Follow Metalink Note 212070.1, “How to add the
Discoverer Portlet in a Portal Page Group?”
Discoverer tips that we learned along the way …
If analysis requires joining tables from an M/S Access database,
consider coding these as calculated fields within Access and not
performing the joins in Discoverer.
The “drill down” feature was established by setting hierarchies
for all of our date fields. Thus, the user can specify the
granularity (e.g., year, quarter, month, day, date).
LOV Item Classes were utilized for coded fields. Thus, users
can drag and drop specific values instead of having to remember
which code to use.
Think carefully when linking data across various datasets. It
was very simple to combine databases/tables and produce
erroneous results. Thus, we limited our data mapping to the
highest level – date & geographic location.
We “portalized” a lot of our assets …
Conclusions
• We found the components of 9iAS Release 2, were
considerably easier to install and configure than
Release 1.
• WebCache worked right away and Portal has been
more stable.
• Several out-of-the-box features (e.g., the suite of
wizards to create Forms, Reports, LOVs) were easy to
learn and actually fun to use.
• The ability to retrieve information from our Microsoft
Access datasets, via a Discoverer portlet, is a real
bonus!
• New portlets being posted – both good & bad news
We’re looking forward to 9.0.4 …
• Location portlet – MapViewer Tool
Even though we don’t use Oracle Spatial, we’re
curious to see if it will work with all of our GIS
data.
• Customizable portlets
We hope to use the connector for Active
Directories to allow third-party authentication
from our O/S.
Life is good !!!