A Portal to a Portal

Having blogged here about my success with the WAI portlet on WebSphere Portal 6.1, I was kinda surprised when I was unable to get it working earlier this week, on a couple of WebSphere Portal Express 6.1.0.0 installations; both on Windows - one native and one on VMware.

Despite my best efforts, I never saw the portal/page navigation appear on the imported web page, even though I made a conscious effort to place the JavaScript code immediately after the body tag.

Instead, I saw: -

[12/12/08 17:05:40:640 GMT] 00000041 SystemOut     O Inside-Out, Default.jsp: Exception raised: java.lang.NullPointerException

When I looked at the fix list for WebSphere Portal 6.10.1 at: -

http://www-01.ibm.com/support/docview.wss?rs=688&uid=swg27014411#6101

I can see: -

PK74444     WebAppIntegrator throws a NullPointerException when urlFindInTheme tag is used in a Portal 6.1 theme

so I immediately went looking for the fix - sadly, it's not available as a standalone fix, but only as part of the fixpack.

Given that I wanted to get 6.10.1 installed, I started the download - thanks to the power of broadband, this 400 MB file didn't take too long.

However, whilst I was waiting, I was fickering around with my portal, trying to reproduce another issue with SSL/HTTPS. As part of my fickering, I toggled the theme for the top-level Content Root -> Home page from Portal Default Theme to PortalWeb2 and back again.

This seemed to "kick" WAI into life, and it's now working perfectly.

I can only assume that the theme toggle forced one of the theme JSPs to be recompiled or, perhaps, magic occurred.

In either case, WAI is now working WITHOUT needing to apply any fixes or fixpacks.