Oracle Instant Portal - Public

I recently began playing with OIP a bit more. It has a fun UI, so when my son asked to make a website for his school project I suggested that my son use it for his project. I figured it would force me to learn the in-and-outs a bit better. Well, I was right.

After getting some content into the site, my son asked to make it available so anyone could see it. I had never even tried it. So, I just tried it. I added PUBLIC to the oip_available_users group in Oracle Internet Directory (OID). Then I added PUBLIC as a view user to the pages I wanted to be public. Seems to make sense, right? It didn't work. After a little poking around I found out that OIP won't allow a page to be public. So, what's the next thing to do? Remove the public user, right? Wrong!

If you use the OIP user management feature to remove a user, it DELETES the user from OID. That, of course, is exactly what I did. I deleted the public user from OID, thereby causing all of my public portal pages to break. I could barely log in.

I did a little research to find a solution. The two solutions I could find were reinstall and try reseeding all of the initial users, then clean up. I did not like either choice. I just created a new user in OID called PUBLIC. Everything has worked since then, but I may yet have issues.

Update: Since this original post I have found that a lot of permissions get lost. You will need to run the script that recreates all of the public permissions on form building, etc. If you run in to this, run all the set_user_acl procedures in the /portal30/admin/plsql/wwv/wwvsecd.sql script, which reference the PUBLIC user (USER_PUBLIC).