Hints and tips for using WSRP with the portal

Registration

The WSRP Producer for IBM^® WebSphere^® Portal Express does not support the WSRP Registration interface. This means that WSRP registration is not supported.

Remote portlets on unauthenticated pages

If you add remote portlets to unauthenticated pages that have public sessions switched off, this has the following two consequences:

1. Session data is lost for each request.
2. An additional request to the Producer is submitted to establish a session.

If you add remote portlets to unauthenticated pages, switch on public sessions. This way you can benefit portal performance and avoid unexpected behavior resulting from the lost session data.

Rendering URLs for forms

Submitting data to a portlet through forms is semantically an action as the state of the portlet is changed by this request. WSRP strongly enforces the separation of action and render requests according to the corresponding semantics. It prevents the submission of form data through render requests. This means that portlets that use render URLs to submit form data do not work remotely.

Portlets using portal internals

With WSRP you cannot use portal internals in portlets, such as engine objects or engine tags. Portlets that use such internals do not work remotely as WSRP does not supply the infrastructure required for this.

Compatibility of portlets with WSRP

Some portlets cannot be provided as WSRP services, as some additional and more advanced WebSphere Portal Express concepts and features are not reflected by the current WSRP standard yet. This includes all portal administration portlets, the Portal Search portlets Manage Search, Search and Browse, and the Search Center, and some other portlets that are provided as part of the portal. Portlets that are based on AJAX or use Javascript to implement client-side aggregation or URL modifications might or might not work correctly with WSRP.

Dynamic titles for remote portlets

The WSRP proxy portlet is written according to the standard portlet API. As the implementation of the standard API portlet container does not support dynamic titles for WebSphere Portal Express, dynamic titles do not work, even if the remote portlet is written according to the IBM portlet API. This includes calls to the methods of the IBM portlet API PortletTitleListener interface.

Invocation of minimized portlets

The WSRP proxy portlet is written according to the standard portlet API. As the implementation of the standard API portlet container does not support the invocation of minimized portlets for WebSphere Portal Express, a minimized portlet is not called even if the remote portlet is written according to the IBM portlet API.

Consumer-side configuration of consumed portlets that do not support shared configuration is not supported with WSRP.

The configuration of the edit_defaults_compatibility portlet mode is not supported for portlets that are consumed by using WSRP.

The PUMA SPI cannot be used with WSRP.

The PUMA SPI does not allow use with remote portlets.

Remote Portlet Web Services (RPWS)

WebSphere Portal Express Version 6.1 does not support the IBM proprietary Remote Portlet Web Services (RPWS) that WebSphere Portal Express Version 4 supported. (This is not the same as WSRP - Web Services for Remote Portlets.)