I have a requirement in liferay portal to allow user to add some specific portlets on a particular page. Same can be done in 2 ways:
This will require some custom code to be plugged in add panel code
create a custom portlet which will be present on left hand
side of page and allows portlet to be added and dragged on page.
On add of portlet it checks if the page can have this portlet and accordingly remove it
The question I have is which of these 2 approaches shall be used, and how?
Note: I was unable to find much about this on google as well
I believe Liferay permission system is strong enough to express what you need.
The portlet list shown in "Add more portlets" menu can be customized through a Regular Role. See How to customize which portlets to show in “Add more portlets” menu for detailed info.
To restrict the options for a single page (or several pages), modify its permissions, so that only the new Regular Role is be able to update it.
Based on your comment to Tomáš Piňos's answer, my suggestion would be to create a custom portlet that uses Liferay's API and enables you to do just this: On the page where it's available, use it to enable/disable the portlets you'd like to be there by use of Liferay's API. You'll find quite a lot of sample when you're looking for the old sevencogs example (that sadly does not compile any more, but in general the API has only changed marginally). The most up to date resources with further links to the ancient code are these 2 blog articles.
About your third option (as you ask in the comments): Yes, it's possible: You can override Liferay's Services as well as react to model changes. This means that you could add your own check on updates. However, I'd feel it inappropriate to offer the option to add any portlet only to prohibit it whenever a user indeed uses the offered option. That's why I didn't include this option in my initial answer.
Related
When a user logs into the Liferay Portal I want to show a visualization of the list of files that they have access to. This visualization would be done using Javascript, but preferably not inside a portlet, but just being run on the Portal homepage.
I was looking into some of the JSON web service examples, but I was a bit confused on how to invoke some of the Liferay remote services to access the document files from an application that doesn't extend the Liferay portlet class.
Is this possible to do this from outside a portlet or would I need to implement something using URL parameters as referred in one of the Liferay examples? I don't know there is something I'm not understanding here.
EDIT: I want to implement these remote service requests for the visualization inside of a custom theme that I am using. Yet, due to Olaf's recommendation, I will look to see if implementing my visualization and service requests inside of a portlet would be a better solution to my needs.
Yes, it's possible. I'm not sure what you mean with "not inside a portlet, but just being run on the portal homepage" - typically everything that's displayed on the UI is encapsulated within a portlet (well, or within the theme - but for maintainability reasons I'd keep it out of the theme)
You'll need the p_auth token - how to obtain it is part of the documentation that you link (or the surrounding chapters)
If you run into specific problems, please edit your question and list them (and your code). Currently your question reads "Is this possible...?" and the answer to this is "Yes".
I have a portal in Liferay 6.2, and need to design the velocity template of a web content that must have a menu listing the pages (linked names) of the site where is present.
My questions are:
Is this possible?
What would be the correct way to do this?
Would it be better to make a portlet instead of a web content for this purpose?
Thanks for the help.
It feels a bit like you are trying to solve many problems in a single template - consider to compose the UI from many different elements (e.g. custom portlets) rather than building the one structure/template that fits all requirements.
That being said, as there's also the chance that your template doesn't do more than just displaying the current navigation: You have two options: The out-of-the-box Navigation portlet is quite configurable, you might be able to utilize that one instead of implementing anything yourself (check the configuration options).
And lastly, if you want to implement for yourself: Get hold of the themeDisplay object. With getLayout() you'll get the current page, while getLayouts() you'll get all pages of the current site and can enumerate them. However, there's one problem: You typically don't have access to the themeDisplay object from a CMS template. But there are several ways to still get to the data (search the Liferay forums for cms template themedisplay). Also, an Application Display Template will be a lot more powerful - and you can also check how the layouts collection is built - just search for usage of ThemeDisplay.setLayouts in Liferay's source code. But with ADT we're diverting from your original question.
Liferay offers a sitemap portlet out-of-the-box which lists pages of a site. You can configure it and define your own application display template (ADT).
I am using web content portlet to develop a portal.
Each page has common theme (which includes header and footer) and we have many portlets placed on each page.
One of the portlet on right side is menu which is common on many pages.
I could have kept it as a part of theme but the menu can be subject to change in future and the end user who will be handling the portal is non-developer.
So if they want to change some data in that menu portlet, they will have to change it on every page which leads to duplication of effort.
Like I said, since end user is a non-developer, I cannot make that portlet part of the theme.
So is there any way where one web content portlet be created once and used on many pages?
You can embed web-content in theme as per link
Here articleId as in above link, you can set in theme-setting, refer to link
I have found a solution right now. If anyone has abetter solution than this..they are most welcome. I would like people to share alternate and better solutions
I am using Liferay 6.2
What I did was added a new web content display portlet which like I said created a new blank web content display portlet.
So my usual method was to add content to this portlet. THis was the method I followed. You can click on Select Web Content button and then select the already created portal from the list and you are done. NO need to create duplicate portlets
First of all, let me tell you what I am or my company is intended to do. We have already developed a project using Java, JSP and Servlet. We want it to integrate with Liferay so that we can change logo, css, images, themes or any other UI related component at run time using Liferay admin panel. But backend should be what we have developed.
In short, the UI of our project is controlled by Liferay, but control of data displayed on UI or submitted from UI should be from our developed backend code.
Now I have a few questions regarding above said approach of fulfilling the requirement:
What we are trying to do is possible?
Is this approach recommendable for what we intended to do?
Or do we need to develop our project from scratch to fit into Liferay? Like developing portlets and deploying in Liferay or other approach that has been given in Liferay documentation.
What about database integration? We have around 15 columns/fields in user table in database of our project which is completely different from that of Liferay's user table.
Liferay is a very new for us. We have checked the documentation section of Liferay but still few things like above said requirements and its implementation is not clear. Also, we would like to know in what scenarios/requirements Liferay is useful.
Ok let me try to answer your question point-wise and I would answer your last question first, which should automatically clear other questions:
Q. Also, we would like to know in what scenarios/requirements Liferay is useful.
This can have a very wide answer, but I have made it shorter for you:
If your site is content heavy and not data heavy then go for Portal
If you plan to use only a single web-application in a portal then I would suggest standalone custom developed web-application is much better.
I agree liferay portal will give you lot of things out-of-box like Single Sign-on, authorization, authentication, friendly-url and page creation and also lot of applications like Blogs, Wikis, Document library, some social networking apps etc. But think about it, do you really need all this? if not, then this is overkill
Here are some really nice links to better understand a portal's usage:
When to use a portal
Why to use portal technology
liferay tag wiki: It has nice description as to what is liferay and it also contains relevant links to Admin guide which will tell you what all functionalities liferay has and how you can manage it.
So still if you find your other questions unanswered, read-on ...
Q1. What we are trying to do is possible?
Nope. Portlet technology is different from Servlet technology. Liferay (or anyother portal) does not provide a way (atleast a simple one) to integrate servlets that would render pages inside a portal. For eg: Since with servlet you define URL mappings for a particular servlets before-hand in a web.xml but in a portal the URLs are generated by the Portlet Container. So portals work with portlets and not Servlets.
Q2. Is this approach recommendable for what we intended to do?
Nope. As I already explained in Q1.
Q3. Or do we need to develop our project from scratch to fit into Liferay? Like developing portlets and deploying in Liferay or other approach that has been given in Liferay documentation.
If you want to go the liferay way then Yes.
If you want to build applications that talk to your custom tables then portlets are the way to go.
Q4. What about database integration? We have around 15 columns/fields in user table in database of our project which is completely different from that of Liferay's user table.
If you go with Liferay. In this scenario you can create a combination of liferay-hook & portlet (may be using service-builder) to customize liferay's User creation mechanism and there by store data in both Liferay's User table and your custom tables.
Liferay's permission system is really fine-grained so you can also benefit from this system and put permission even on the data level.
In conclusion I would say:
Everything boils down to what your requirements are and what resources you have. And sometimes what future requirements you can have.
Note: All the terms used in this answer which are specific to liferay (like service-builder, hook etc) are explained in the liferay tag wiki.
Hope this helps. If you would like to know anything specific I would gladly update my answer.
I'm currently working on a Liferay project and want to get rid of the My Pages and My Submissions menu items on the right side so that users of my site do not bother with them. Tried looking for the jsp that renders the left side menu, but could manage to remove the item from there. Any ideas how to proceed? Thanks!!!
You could add the following lines to your portal-ext.properties (usually found in webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes under tomcat):
#deactivate Personal Community with *private* pages
layout.user.private.layouts.enabled=false
#deactivate Personal Community with *public* pages
layout.user.public.layouts.enabled=false
#hide Personal Community from my places
my.places.show.community.private.sites.with.no.layouts=false
and restart the server.
Recently I had the same task assigned. Fortunately removing this items from the menu is quite straightforward since the control panel is nothing more than a special layout for displaying portlets that are deployed in the portal server. You can read my blog post here to check the simple steps on how to customize the Control Panel and My Account portlet.
http://liferay.bdedov.eu/2012/02/clean-up-control-panel-from-unnecessary.html
You probably rather want to limit the permissions to people. Don't give out global administration roles, but create your own roles, "Define Permissions" for them as you need them and leave out the permissions that you don't want to provide to your users - e.g. "access in control panel" or the general permission to add a page.
Otherwise you'll miss other ways to use the interface and still allow them to add pages through other means (e.g. "Manage/Page").
Edit: The easiest way to get rid of "My Submissions" is to undeploy the workflow plugin (kaleo-web) - of course you can only do this if you don't need workflow.