Portal: Data At Our Fingertips!

Gail McGarry MacAulay

Tara Morgan

Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission

Florida Marine Research Institute

Session # 36746

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 MARINE RESEARCH INSTITUTE

Florida Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission

FL Fish & Wildlife Conservation Commission’sFlorida 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

Dell Power Edge 6450

Windows NT SP 4

4+ gb RAM

9iAS Infrastructure

Oracle Database Server

Dell Power Edge 6400

Windows 2000 Advanced Server

3.6 gb RAM

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

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

ANATOMY OF OUR DATA PORTAL

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 !!!

the “Where Do You Want To Go?” pane

This pane was created using the Menu Wizard in the Oracle9iAS Portal

Navigator page.

Let’s move on to our second pane --

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!

FORM

CHART

LIST OF VALUES

The user enters the year and species number, then clicks on “Query” to retrieve data from our commercial fish landings database. Note: The Query button disappears when the data are retrieved!

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.

Data from two tables 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.

In the Wizard, we selected the “Reports from SQL Query”

option and used a database link to access views containing the

landings summaries.

The user clicks on a summary, and a new

window pops up to display the report.

The “Links to M/S Access” tab is an Oracle Discoverer portlet that retrieves workbooks/worksheets created from our

Microsoft Access data sets.

Clicking on “View Worksheet” displays the

worksheet information in a new window.

In the worksheet, the user can decide whether to display the data by location or date.

The user can select the date.

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 !!!