I have been using Liferay for work for 2 weeks. I noticed that it's a bit difficult to find good documentation and tutorials.
Until now I created pages from the web portal. After I create them, I drag and drop portlets. I don't really like this approach, I would prefer to use a coding approach. Is there a way to create a website or page programmatically by defining a project as I do to create portlets?
Moreover, I am using Liferay with WebLogic 10.3.6. I want to know where liferay puts pages I created via web-portal on the file system. I suppose that a file, or something similar, is created when I declare a new site on the Liferay web-portal.
Thank you all,
Marco
Yes Liferay has it's Database, all data of any Liferay object is stored in the database and / or on the file system depending on your configuration.
However, one of the functionality of Liferay is to let you create pages / sites through the UI. As documented in the Java Portal Specification and Liferay Server Documents your approach to create pages in an alternative way is possible but it is part of Liferay's Portal Services. You can use Liferay's Service (HTTP REST) API to call the related service. To access those APIs you need to configure your Liferay Server.
In case you want to do programmatically you still need to configure, enable and call those external HTTP services from your code. You should not create Liferay Objects from your own code hosted as an extension inside your Liferay Instance as that will result inconsistency in your Liferay Database / filesystem. (As in case of page creation Liferay creates a set of other related objects in it's database / filesystem.)
In your liferay bundle you will find two plugins of interest.
First is resources-importer-web for which description says
The Resources Importer app allows front-end developers to package web
content, portlet configurations, and layouts together in a theme
without saving it as a compiled .LAR file thereby allowing for greater
flexibility in its usage between Liferay Portal versions.This app will automatically create associated content when other
plugins are deployed that are configured to make use of the Resource
Importer app.This app installs as a Liferay service.
Second is welcome-theme which declares resources to be created by resources-importer-web. This on should be example how to create your own. Take a look at
welcome-theme\WEB-INF\src\resources-importer\*
welcome-theme\WEB-INF\liferay-plugin-package.properties
This feature is described at importing-resources-with-themes
As mentioned by gabor_the_kid, Liferay stores all objects in its tables. For example, User related objects would be in user table. Liferay exposed services or API's to change the default/to add new behaviors by program but not easier than achieving it through UI. Also maintenance should be considered for going program way of creating pages or layouts etc.
You can describe your changes using xml and use the Liferay Portal DB Setup core to create the changes in DB.
The library defines the list of available xml configurations.
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 created portlets for liferay and prepare couple of pages. Now I want to create installation script, which create pages definition in customer liferay server. I know that pages export/import is possible using LAR file, but this could be done only manualy, or using remote publishing which i am not able to do.
I was searching on net and found ddm tool. Which should be able to do that. Unfortunately i'm not able to get it work as it export only web content, blogs, wikis, etc, but not pages with portlets. It is probably because one of the condition is "Every Template must be assigned to a Structure. Don't create any templates on the Liferay server which does not have a structure connected to it.
". But how can I assign page to structure ? Cant find anything.
Or is there any other option for automatic page creation, which could be used ?
In case you created a custom theme, you can easily use the "resources importer" to create an entire site via the "sitemap.json" file (define pages: choose layout, assign portlets to the columns, ...). You can also export existing content as xml from the current instance and import them via the theme. Same thing for web content structures and templates.
for more details: https://dev.liferay.com/develop/tutorials/-/knowledge_base/6-1/importing-resources-with-your-themes
Unfortunately theme is produced by another supplier, so this solution isn't suitable for me.
at the end i find working solution which consist of following steps:
create plugin hook
in hook setup upgrade process
in the upgrade process create pages with appropriate layout, friendlyUrl, etc. All these is possible to do using liferay api
Don't have enough reputation, so at least two links
https://www.liferay.com/de/web/james.falkner/blog/-/blogs/7cogs-is-dead-long-live-7cogs-
https://github.com/azzazzel/liferay-official-plugins/tree/master/hooks/sevencogs-hook/docroot/WEB-INF/src/com/liferay/sevencogs/hook/upgrade
I am developing Liferay portal and I have one portlet which handles the administrator side of the portal and one the client side. The thing is that the clients cannot see the administrator page (including the portlet). Also I have created custom DataBase for the portal (I included my own tables in the Liferay database using Service Builder). Now I want to use the same database so I can take info from it using the client portlet.
Any ideas?
I am using Liferay 6.1 with Tomcat and Liferay SDK plugin for Eclipse.
You can copy the [portlet name]-service.jar from Web-Inf/lib, and paste it to any other portlet's lib folder. Even better if you can do this with maven and add this jar as a dependency. This way you can have access to the Util Classes that your service provides, to any other Portlet
All portlets in a plugin project share the service builder service made by that plugin (because they end up in one war file and thus share runtime context). So you could just put both your portlets in the same plugin and they can both access that plugin's service builder services/tables. I think you will find this is a commonly used approach. The permission and visibility issues you mention are not impacted by this organization.
Doing it this way keeps the deployment simple -- just deploy the plugin's war, done.
If there are reasons beyond your control that require the portlets to be in separate plugins, then it becomes harder -- yannicuLar's approach is one way.
If you have two portlets sharing same tables/entities , you can copy the service.jar to
tomcat-7.0.27\lib\ext a common location where these two portlets can access this .jar at runtime.
Now our team is facing new project - creation of new company's intranet portal. Because of some reasons we are considering java open source portals and deciding between Liferay and GateIn.
One of very important requirements is following: portal representation for users must depend on country/language settings of customer computer, it means not only portlets localization but users in US subsidiaries of the company should see probably other structure than users in France.
Is it possible to implement the requirement in Liferay and GateIn?.
This can definitely be achieved through Liferay. Please have a look at the concepts of creating organisations.
Am not sure if this can be done in GateIn. However, there are many other things that you may need to keep in mind before choosing these Portals. I have tried to mention few of them here.
1. Check the stability of the Portal server that you will choose to run on a particular Container. GateIn initially was unstable.
2. You may have to override few files (for your customization) if required. GateIn uses GTMPL view technology for the same. Check how good are you in this. In this case, Liferay is easier (Liferay doesn't use any GTMPL UI framework)
3. Apart from developing a location based Portal, if you are also trying to achieve other things like fully Ajax based pages, a good UI framework (like JSF) etc then check if the Portal server you are choosing runs on a particular Container which supports Ajax, JSF (latest versions)
Above were few and list may grow. But, to conclude I would suggest to go for Liferay :)
This can be achieved with Gatein at different level :
Sites : you can declare multiple sites running on the same portal instance(sharing same User Base). In this case you can automatically redirect user to different country sites, based on the country/language of the user.
Sites Navigations : Gatein provides portal, group and user navigations. Navigation is created dynamically when a user connects to the portal. You can have only websites, navigation will created dynamically by user (based on group and user permissions).
Pages (Dynamics layout rendering): GateIn renders each page dynamically. A page is composed of multiple containers that contains portlets or gadgets.
By setting permissions on each container and by using User Group or Membership of the connected user, it's possible to have different page layout.
Of course, you can also mixed these 3 approaches to build your portal.
Liferay is very buggy, and community is very bad. Unless you pay the support.
GateIn promises much, but still lacks functionality.
You may consider JBoss Juzu and Apache Struts to develop generic portlets in order to void any portal vendor lock-in.
Struts provides features of internationalization, localization, timezones achieve my project.
I make use of struts2-portlet plugin to achieve a reporting portlet running on multiple portals. Here is my sample: code.google.com/p/jasperrocks/wiki/Features
Using the SharePoint API, how can I modify an extended webapp web.config file?
I have to do some changes in this file to specify the connection string, membershipprovider, etc... for using Forms Authentication.
Currently, I can change the "master" webapplication web.config file, but not the extended one.
Edited
I'm using Sp 2007. I'm already using SPWebConfigModification class to modify the parent webapp. Thoses modifications are propagated to the extended webapp. I have to change ONLY the extended one. But I don't find the way to do it.
What I'm trying to achieve, is to program a little wizard that:
Shows a WebApp list so the user can select one
Extend that selected webapp to a different zone
Configure that extended zone to use Forms Authentication
Thanks
I got an answer form a blog.
In your case , you need to write a Web Application scoped feature which after you provision your site using your C# app, it is deployed to the newly-provisioned site and in the receiver of the feature you inject the required web.config settings because in that context configuration API is obtainable , but again bear the following in mind:
If you don’t use SPWebConfigModification class and either use ASP.NET 2.0 configuration API or your own mechanism , propagating changes across the farm is YOUR RESPONSIBILITY. If this happens on an standalone installation then you don;t need to be worried about this.
So it cannot be done externally. We have to do a feature in order to acheve this.
Thanks
Quick answer: look into the SPWebConfigModification class. I am assuming you're using SharePoint 2007. The best way to learn about this is to dig into open source projects:
Google code search: http://www.google.com/codesearch?q=spwebconfigmodification&hl=en&btnG=Search+Code
This project on CodePlex looks like it's one big SPWebConfigModification: http://www.codeplex.com/ajaxifymoss/Release/ProjectReleases.aspx?ReleaseId=13360