Main Settings (External Operation)

An external operation allows you to run shell scripts (for example, .sh or .bat files) through the portal and schedule these actions through portal jobs (see About Jobs). For example, you might want to create scripts that query documents, ping portal servers, e-mail snapshot query results to users, or run any custom job on a specified schedule.

Warnings:

• Because the standard error output from the command or script is captured to the job log, avoid the use of new shells, redirects, and pipes.

• Passing arguments to cmd or start in shell programs might disable the time-out mechanism.

• When you are extending scripts in the External Operation Editor, carefully consider all potential effects of the scripts. Make sure that your script does not introduce a security risk.  

To define an external operation:

1. In the Operating System Command box, type the relative path and file name of the script enclosed in quotes (").
   
   Important: All external operation scripts must reside in the scripts directory of each of the Automation Services that will run them. The scripts directory is located on the computer that hosts the Automation Service, in the Oracle WebCenter Interaction installation directory (for example, C:\bea\alui\ptportal\scripts). The Automation Service will not run any scripts that are not in this directory.
   
   The following tokens in the command line will be substituted:

• names of environment variables surrounded with percent signs (%)
• <user_id>
• <security_token>
• <job_id>
• <operation_id>
• <last_job_runtime>

Expanded tokens that contain spaces or special characters which are not surrounded with quotes (") are enclosed in quotes automatically.

2. In the Time-out in seconds box, type the number of seconds after which, if this operation is still running, you want the job to stop. If you do not want to set a time-out, leave this setting at 0 (infinite).

3. To run this operation, you must associate it with a job and schedule the job to run.

External Operations Created Upon Installation

An external operation is a powerful feature that allows you to create custom jobs. To learn more about external operations, see the two working examples that are created upon installation:

• Bulk Subscriber: This external operation subscribes users to communities and groups when you use bulk add.

• Snapshot Query Mailer: This is a sample external operation that e-mails the results of snapshot queries to users. Create a copy of this operation and edit the copy by replacing 200 in the arguments with the ID of snapshot query you want to e-mail. To change other arguments, such as the e-mail subject or the generated HTML, refer to the SavedSearchMailer.sh (or .bat) file in the Automation Service's script directory. To learn how to create snapshot queries, see Construct Snapshot Query.

• To display the page associated with this help topic:

1. Click Administration.
2. Open an administrative object folder.
3. In the Create Object menu, click External Operation.