Main Steps to Add a Portlet

Overview

One of the administrative tasks of a group content administrator is to deploy custom information for particular groups of portal users. To help accomplish this goal, you can create and share portlets with groups that are defined in SAS metadata.

Add and Share a Portlet

Here is a summary of the steps that are required to add and share a portlet. For complete instructions, see the online Help that is provided with the SAS Information Delivery Portal:
  1. In SAS Management Console, verify that a permissions tree folder exists for the group with which you want to share the portlet. If necessary, create a permissions tree folder. See Managing Portal Permission Trees in Metadata .
  2. Log on to the portal as a group content administrator (in order to share the portlet with the respective group).
  3. You can create a new portlet and add it to a page, create a new portlet independently of a page, or add an existing portlet to a page.
  4. Edit the portlet in order to add links, applications, or other content to the portlet.
  5. If you are creating a URL display portlet that is not displayed in an inline frame (IFRAME), you must enable the portal to access the URL. To enable this access, add permissions statements for the portlet to the Java policy file for the portal's Web application server.
    If the URL display portlet accesses a Web site that uses relative URL paths for its graphics, those graphics are not displayed. To ensure that those graphics are displayed correctly, enable the “Show URL Content Inside an I-Frame” option in inline frame (IFRAME).
    The URL specifies the protocol and address of the HTML file to display. The Java permissions that are needed to access the HTML file depend on whether the URL protocol is for a file system or an HTTP server. To add a permissions statement to the policy file, depending on the URL type, do one of the following:
    • For the file protocol, add a java.io.FilePermission statement that grants access to all of the files that make up the HTML fragment; these files include the HTML file and any resources that it uses (such as images, CSS, and JavaScript). The following permission grants access to the entire C drive and all subdirectories: 
      permission java.io.FilePermission "C:\\-", "read";
    • For the HTTP protocol, add a java.net.SocketPermission statement that grants access to the host and port of the machine serving up the HTML fragment. The following permission grants access to the Web server running on host.domain: 
      permission java.net.SocketPermission "host.domain:80",
        "connect, resolve";
    For more information about policy files, see SAS Intelligence Platform: Middle-Tier Administration Guide. For more information about URL display portlets, see Understanding Portlets . Refer also to the online Help that is provided with the portal.
  6. Implement authorization for the contents on the portlet. Take any necessary steps to control access to files, reports, or other items that have been added to the portlet. For general information about access control, see Understanding Portal Authorization.
  7. Make the portlet available in the portal.
    Edit the portlet in order to share the portlet with a group that is defined in SAS metadata. If the portlet contains applications, links, or syndication channels that you are authorized to share, you can specify whether you also want to share those contents.
    When you share the portlet with a group, all members of the group can search for and add the portlet to their pages.
    Note: In the portal, users can arrange portlets in columns by using width percentages for the columns. These percentages suggest how the portlets fit on a page, but are not absolute column widths. Some portlets require a minimum width in order to be displayed, regardless of the percentage that is associated with the portlet's column. In addition, a portlet's size can vary based on the content that it contains. If a particular portlet cannot fit within a column, the percentage that you specified for the column is overridden by the width that is actually required in order to display the portlet.
    Alternatively, you can add the portlet to a page that has been shared or that you intend to share with the group. Depending on the share type, group members will either see the page the next time they log on, or group members can search for and add the page.
After you have created a portlet, you can edit the portlet, remove the portlet from a page, or delete the portlet permanently from the portal environment. Any changes that you make to a shared portlet are seen by all users who can access the portlet. If you permanently delete a shared portlet, the portlet is removed from all portal views.
For complete instructions about creating, sharing, editing, or deleting a portlet, see the online Help that is provided with the portal. For information about sharing portal content in general, see Sharing Content in the Portal .
Note: All users can create portlets and add portlets to their pages by using the portal Options menu. Only users who are authorized as an administrator for a group can share a portlet with the group, or can edit a shared portlet.
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