Whilst following the white paper from Oracle on the “Development lifecycle in Oracle WebCenter Portal” I came across a significant issue for new users of WebCenter which was a missing project for the tutorial.

It stated in the introduction that there are applications shipped with the whitepaper but I couldn’t find them and neither could Oracle Support. To get going in the meantime I created my own “GenericWebService” project that satisfied the requirements of the tutorial. This is available here.

Alternatively, follow the steps below to create it yourself.

Missing connection.xml file
Section 3a: Create a Web Service Proxy Facade – On page 28 the whitepaper says to update the connection.xml file with the contents in yellow in the page above. However, for my application that I had created I didn’t have a connection.xml file for some reason. To resolve this I closed the GenericServiceConsumer application, went to the GenericServiceConsumer\.adf\META-INF folder and created a new file called connection.xml. On re-opening the GenericServiceConsumer project the file was then available and I could paste the conents below into it.

<?xml version = '1.0' encoding = 'UTF-8'?>
<References xmlns="http://xmlns.oracle.com/adf/jndi">
  <Reference name="GenericUserWebServiceConnection"
             className="oracle.adf.model.connection.webservice.impl.WebServiceConnectionImpl"
             manageInOracleEnterpriseManager="true" deployable="true" xmlns="">
    <Factory className="oracle.adf.model.connection.webservice.api.WebServiceConnectionFactory"/>
    <RefAddresses>
      <XmlRefAddr addrType="WebServiceConnection">
        <Contents>
          <wsconnection description="http://localhost:7101/GenericWebService-UserWebService-context-root/UserServiceWS?WSDL"
                        service="{http://oracle.com/}UserServicePort"/>
        </Contents>
      </XmlRefAddr>
    </RefAddresses>
  </Reference>
</References>

Nullpointer Exception
I also had a nullpointer exception thrown when I first started up the taskflow in the JSF page. This was probably because of the home made web service project that I created above. It wasn’t a SOAP based web service and therefore the URL was wrong in the connection.xml file.

You will notice that mine above contains the URL http://localhost:7101/GenericWebService-UserWebService-context-root/UserServiceWS?WSDL whereas the whitepaper’s URL is http://localhost:8888/GenericWebService-UserWebService-context-root/UserServiceSoap12HttpPort?WSDL