Core Content Only

Content Profiles and Content Rules provide a mechanism for customizing a variety of pages within UCM.  Generally just referred to as Profiles, you can conditionally configure/customize the check-in, update, search and information pages as relates to the context of the content and user intent.

One of the often used by seldom explained parts of Profiles is something called Side Effects.  You will find the Side Effects tab on the Add/Edit Activation Conditions screen and it primarily allows you to accomplish two things:

1. Add name/value pairs as IdocScript that will then get pushed to local data if the activation condition is true.
2. Add custom IdocScript to a rule that is only evaluated if the activation condition is true and this can include logic like if and else statements or loops.  Basically all IdocScript is possible here (though all of it may or may not be useful).  As such, once a rule is activated, you can include logic, use includes from a component, etc.

What specifically might one use Side Effects for?  For a simple example let’s pretend we have a profile for some scanned content.  This content is checked in as an image based PDF (no OCR, no searchable text).  Your profile should not display the full text search box in this case.  There is no full text to be searched.  You can accomplish this with a Side Effect in your profile:

<$SearchEngineName="DATABASE.METADATA"$>

Let’s take another example.  Perhaps on the check-in page you want the alternate file field to be removed.  You could go into config.cfg and add this setting, but it would be universal.  More likely you want this to happen in a specific, conditional context.  Try adding this as a Side Effect to your rule:

<$suppressAlternateFile="1"$>

Want more examples of Profiles, Rules and Side Effects? See below:

1. Using Rules & Profiles To Drive Custom Pages
2. Suppressing Alternate File
3. Thumbnail search in Content Server
4. Thumbnail search in Content Server #2
5. Hiding the Primary File field in UCM
6. Metadata field tool tips

Error:

csCheckinIDNotUnique

There is actually a good Oracle Support article on this error.  There can be a variety of reasons why one might encounter this issue.  Occassionally the values in the Counters table get out of date.  Sometimes you’re attempting to check in a new piece of content with the same Content ID as an existing piece of content without knowning it.  Oftentimes this happens if you are integrating with Content Server and are attempting to generate a Content ID.

Once you’ve have fixed your core logic issue you may still be left with a “corrupted” piece of content in the system that you need to get rid of before you can make a fresh start with your updated code or process.  To take care of this situation:

Step 1 – Open Admin Applets -> Repository Manager

Step 2 – Search/Filter to find the offending Content ID.

Step 3 -Delete this revision in the system.

You should now be able to checkin content normally again without this error occurring.

Running UCM admin applications directly from the server where Content Server is installed is called running them in stand-alone mode. No longer are they called applets, since the term “applet” is usually referred to a program which is included in a web page.

Stand-alone admin applications are located here: CS_INSTALL_DIRECTORY/bin/

Executable applications are listed in this folder. If an application is not listed, it can be entered as a parameter to the IntradocApp application, as in this example: % ./IntradocApp Workflow

In Windows, you can find the applications in your Start Menu: Start, Programs, Content Server, instance, Utilities, utility

In UCM 10g, you could run these stand-alone applications with no additional setup.

In UCM 11g, due to the advent of WebLogic, these applications need some setup. You need to setup a JDBC driver to talk to the database and you will need to login with a local user.

Below are 12 simple steps to get stand-alone admin applications running.

1. Login to UCM as an administrator.

2. Navigate to Administration > Admin Applets > User Admin.

3. Find the local user “sysadmin”.

4. Click “Edit”.

5. Change the password to something secure that you will remember.

6. Click “OK” and exit User Admin.

7. Navigate to MIDDLEWARE_HOME/user_projects/domains/DOMAIN/ucm/bin/

8. Open SystemProperties.

9. Go to the “Database” tab.

10. Select Oracle Thin JDBC Driver.

11. Click “OK”.

12. Now when you launch any of the stand-alone applications you will be prompted for a user name and password. Login with sysadmin and click “OK”. The application should now load.

The two stand-alone admin applications that do not need login credentials are SystemProperties and Component Wizard.

Oracle documentation on running UCM 11g stand-alone admin applications can be found here.

I use JDeveloper as my daily IDE. When developing custom 10gR3 UCM Java components, you must restart content server between each and every build. So even if you make the smallest change, you still need to restart content server. This means I have a whole tab dedicated to the “Start/Stop Content Server” page in Admin Server.

With some magic from Ant (an Apache Java library and command-line tool that helps compile, assemble, test and run Java applications) we can automate the process of building our code and restarting UCM (on a Windows development environment) all with one simple keystroke.

To get started, in JDeveloper select File – > New Gallery. On the left select Ant (under General) – > Buildfile from Project. Click OK.

On the next screen, the defaults should be fine. I called my file name: build.xml and checked “Make This the Project Buildfile”. Click OK.

A new window will open which will be displaying an XML file. Part way through the file, you fill find a line that reads similar to:

<target name=”all” description=”Build the project” depends=”compile,copy”/>

You should change this line to read as follows:

<target name=”all” description=”Build the project” depends=”compile,copy,restartUCM”/>

Then below the very last closing target tag (right before the closing project tag), add the following code:

<target name=”restartUCM”>
<exec executable=”net”>
<arg value=”stop”/>
<arg value=”IDC Content Service ecm”/>
</exec>
<exec executable=”net”>
<arg value=”start”/>
<arg value=”IDC Content Service ecm”/>
</exec>
</target>

Make sure to replace ecm above with the name of your UCM server. Now you may save the build.xml file.

And that is it. Now, instead of building our code using CTRL + F9 we can use the following keystroke: CTRL + ALT + SHIFT + F9. This executes our Ant script which in turn compiles our code and then restarts UCM.

Note: This will only work for UCM versions older than 11g and on a Windows server. 11g is built on top of WebLogic, and thus the Ant script would need to restart the actual WebLogic server domain instead of a Windows service. If you are not using Windows, you can do some similar logic using the “service” command in Linux.

If you want to hide the alternate file on the check-in page you can add the following configuration to your <install>/config/config.cfg file.  You can also add this to the General Configuration Variables in the Admin Server.  Both of these methods will require a restart.  This will hide alternate file globally.  And what is the setting?  It looks like this:

suppressAlternateFile=1

What if you would like to do this for a certain profile, but not globally?  No problem.  Simply select one of your rules for your profile.  Enable the activation conditions and add this setting as a side effect:

<$suppressAlternateFile=1$>

No Alternate File