I am developing a portal page using the Liferay . I want to know the technical aspects of it. What exactly happens in the background when a portlet (either a custom built or an inbuilt) is dragged and dropped to the portal page. Curious to know. Please give me some insights.
Thanks
You might need to go through some basic portlet documentation first before start up here. Liferay itself is having nice documentation for developers, which you might want to checkout.
LIFERAY DEVELOPER DOCUMENTATION
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'm working on a Liferay portal instance that has generated some 60000 sites/communities. These communities are already in use. We've built up a theme for the portal, and we're trying to deploy it to ALL communities within the portal. We've already tested it on a few communities manually, and of course, we've already set the default theme via control panel, but there;'s got to be a smarter way to make the switchover than manually swapping 60000 sites.
Any ideas? I'll mention: I'm not a Liferay expert, and I don't have a lot of access to the innards of this environment, so I'm hoping the solution doesn't involve writing a new portlet or something.
You will definitely require to create a utility(portlet/hook) based on, when you want to apply the theme, at the time of deployment or through some button click.
You need to use LayoutSetLocalServiceUtil to perform that, if you want to apply theme to all pages of each community/sites.
Thanks,
Ankit
I'm quite new in liferay and this must have been a very basic question.
Can we make site templates deployable as standalone component like themes? If yes how can we do this? Any help or content explains how to do this will be great.
Thanks
You can export and import site templates - they'll not be deployed like themes, but you can carry them from one portal to another. Check the cogs-icon in the top-right of the Site Template configuration screen in Control-Panel and you'll find the Export/Import Actions. The individual SiteTemplate's Action button also has an Export option available.
Another option is to get familiar with Liferay's API (learn ServiceBuilder for understanding the concepts) and examine the sourcecode. A good starting point is the ancient 7cogs sample code (not all will compile as-is, this article is for an older version, but the principles will help you to understand). Also note that the article links a second follow-up article. Everything in Liferay is done through the API and you can literally automate everything - you'll "just" have to find the proper API and use it.
Site templates can be deployed in a plugin via the use of Liferay's Resources Importer.
See: https://dev.liferay.com/develop/learning-paths/themes/-/knowledge_base/6-2/importing-resources-for-your-theme for more information.
You can probably find some some examples here: https://www.liferay.com/marketplace/-/mp/category/15828894
I'm looking for the Related Content portlet in Liferay, and in particular for Social Office. I know about the Asset Publisher and Related Assets portlet. But I can seem to find the Related Content portlet? I'm using 6.1 CE of Liferay and I just installed the newest Social Office CE yesterday. Was this portlet removed/deprecated?
This page claims that there is this feature: http://www.liferay.com/products/liferay-social-office/features
And this page says the portlet should already be there. But I don't see it.
http://www.liferay.com/documentation/social-office/2.0/user-guide/-/ai/lp-2-0-soen01-social-office-features-0
Any help would be great. Thanks.
Related Assets will only display when there actually are related assets. Further, AFAIK it will not show when you show all blogposts (the documentation says it's on the Blogs page), but when you select one article.
Alternatively, if you have sufficient permissions, enable "Edit Controls" in the dockbar and the portlet will appear (greyed out and without content).
Another alternative, if it indeed is not there, you might be able to change the social office site template and add it to the template.
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.