SAP Blogs: KM search iView does not work correctly in External Facing Portal

Tuesday, May 20

Symptom

KM iview (e.g search function in Portal masterhead) does not work correctly when the portal is used as External Facing Portal (EFP).
The search URL is different from the URL through non-external accessing, like:
irj/portal/servlet... - EFP
irj/servlet... - non-external
Authentication screen appears.

Environment

SAP NetWeaver Java

Reproducing the Issue

Portal was configured external.
Users access from Portal from external. (e.g a anonymous user access portal from internet)
Execute search function in masterhead.
Authenticate screen appears.

Cause

In External Facing Portal, all iViews are embedded which will create a plain html without IFRAMES or FRAMES.
So all the link, buttons, events and navigation performed in this EFP portal will be reflected in the browser URL.
The search label in masthead area is a reference to the search iView and therefore when the customer clicks on it the result is a URL.
Basically it is a href or action to a navigation target (in general all the navigations in EFP trigger this kind of URLs.)
However the KM iView is htmlb based, it is not EFP compatible and the search button is a htmlb component that triggers a server event. This event is passed to the server with a URL similar to this URL:
[http://ep.app.com.cn:50000/irj/servlet/prt/portal/prtroot/pcd!
3aportal_content!2fevery_user!2fgeneral!2feu_role!2fcom.sap.km.home_ws!
2fcom.sap.km.hidden!2fcom.sap.km.urlaccess!2fcom.sap.km.basicsearch?
layoutSetMode=exclusive&ResourceListType=com.sapportals.wcm.SearchResult
List&SearchType=quick&QueryString=test]
There are a bunch of parameters processing in the server and according to them the portal is refreshed, the navigation is performed.

Resolution