My first concern is that my Admin is worried about the overhead Portals create. I would like to know what other Admins have to say about this, is it an administration nightmare? Is it a performance nightmare?

My second concern is that we have one environment. We are only allowed the portals which have been deemed necessary by the Admin. So, Save As or Creating Portals is not allowed, any changes we make will be live and if a goof happens then our users will find out what Live Dev means. What are your thoughts, ideas for approach?


I am working on a portal and my approach has been to -INCLUDE the reporting fex that resides in the EDA environment. Our EDA environment has two nodes, one that is secure and one that is not.
When I include a fex that uses .mas files against our Mainframe/DataWarehouse tables I am getting the error that no password has been provided.
I am being told that I am engineering this wrong and that everything that I do has to exist under the CONTENT folder. I am hesitant to do this as the reports in question are also being scheduled within report caster and I just really hate the idea of maintaining two sets of code or having to move everything to the content folder and then find all the schedules for each fex I move and re-do them. It all seems as if no matter what I do is going to be 10x more work than what I first imagined.

My question then is...if you are moving your users to the Portal environment, what was your approach. Pitfalls/Blessings/Reasons for a Mental Health Day

Many thanks ahead of time and I hope this made some sense.

This message has been edited. Last edited by: FP Mod Chuck,

In my world, the Admin doesn't dictate how I architect an application. S/he supports the one I choose. The idea that you're not allowed to have a Dev, Test, Prod environments makes no sense. If that's dictated by your Admin, you should try to explain the dangers to his/her boss.

The repository has very little overhead. It is safer than leaving things on disk. It is the recommended way to use WebFOCUS and like it or not it's the direction IB is going. Resistance is futile. Take the plunge and you'll see all the benefits of using the Domains and you'll have happier users.

Hi Seibel

I love what you have written in your profile and signature, what a great attitude..

Unfortunately there is no silver bullet for moving from 7.7.03 where you have all of your code on the reporting server. I have seen other customers use URL's defined in the content area with WFServlet calls to run procedures (fex's) from the app folders and URL's with /approot references to run html forms stored there as well. That works great for environments where the web tier and reporting server are on a single machine. It is definitely a chore to move the code from the reporting server to the content area and I agree you don't want to just duplicate it and maintain it in two places. I do agree with Babak that the future of WF Development is to create anything new in the content area. Once you have implemented a strategy for using the content area the portal is an excellent deployment area first of all due the the enhanced security to isolate applications. Performance of the portal is as good as the performance of your application meaning that long running reports will still be long running but not worse.

I hope this helps you!