Oracle ESS Central UI Application and remote rendering of Job Parameters

Thought of sharing some information on how ESS Submission interface is designed to accept job parameters as user input.

ESS Global Submission UI is the primary interface for business users to submit job requests. The Central Submission interface is hooked up to Navigator menu in the Fusion Applications UI Shell [ Navigator -> Tools -> Schedule Processes].The extended functionality of ESS Global Submission UI allows users to submit job requests across CRM/HCM/FSCM domain in the Fusion Apps (FA) topology.

ESS CentralUi application deployed to the FA Common Domain acts as the portlet consumer and dynamically registers portlet producers at runtime. In the FA context, these portlet producers are basically remote web applications (deployed across Financials/CRM/HCM domain weblogic managed servers), that host the parameters ViewObject (VO) to facilitate the collection of user input as parameters for ESS job request runtime execution.

The Oracle Portlet Bridge exposes JSF applications and task flows as JSR 168 portlets. In Oracle Fusion Applications, portlets are WSRP portlets. The purpose of the Web Services for Remote Portlets (WSRP) protocol is to provide a web services standard that allows for the visual "plug-n-play" of remote running portlets from disparate sources.

Just as a web application relies on the servlet container to invoke custom developed servlets, a portal application relies on the portal container (i.e. Oracle Webcenter implementation) that uses the portlet API to invoke portlets. The ESS CentralUi application contacts the portlet producers that provide the portlets (i.e the ESS SRS TaskFlow with parametersVO exposed as portlet by the portlet-bridge) to be rendered on the ESS job submission page. The figure below illustrates the basic architecture of the ESS consumer web application EssCentralUiApp' interaction with the portlet producers.

Note: The portlet producer look-up for dynamic registration is based on the specific name derived from value of the ESS jobDefinition property 'EXT_PortletContainerWebModule'.

Refer the official Oracle Webcenter documentation for more details on Portlets & Portlet-bridge implementation.