newbie --> How to deploy my jsr 168 portlet inside liferay - liferay

Three simple questions...
Question 1.
I have a JSR168 portlet that is deployed over IBM Websphere Portal server at my company. I was using a version of IBM Portal server for my development but strictly speaking I don't think I am allowed to use these at my company. So now my plan is to do my development and testing on my local machine using liferay and then deploy to IBM Portal Server.
From what I have read about liferay since it supports jsr168 I should not have any problems. Is this correct?
Question 2.
I've just finished installing the liferay 6.2-5 stack on my mac from the Bitnami site. It is running but I am having troubles understanding how I can deploy my first portlet (which by the way works under IBM Portal Server).
After logging in I go to Admin> Control Panel> Apps> App Manager. I then hit Install and select my war file and then put in a context root. But I keep getting an error message "Please enter a valid url".
What is the problem here?
Question 3.
After the Portlet has been installed how can I see it in liferay?
thanks in advance

for 1: correct, Liferay supports JSR-168
for 2: You can either drop your WAR file in Liferay's "deploy" folder, which will cause Liferay to deploy it from there. If it disappears from that folder within a few seconds, it has been deployed.
The administrative UI allows you to do a similar thing through the Web UI - you can either upload your plugin or point to a URL where Liferay can download it: Don't mix it up with Websphere's admin UI where you give the context name for an uploaded application. In Liferay you'll either have to use the upload OR the URL. The context name is derived from the name of the WAR file.
for 3: You'll find your plugin when you choose the "Add" button - login as Administrator and you'll find a "+" labelled button on the left side of the screen. Choose "Application" and look for your portlet (you can filter the list). If you include some Liferay-specific deployment descriptors (look up WEB-INF/liferay-display.xml) you can also influence which section/headline it appears under.

Related

How are Liferay Remote Services accessed from an application that's not a portlet?

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".

umbraco deployed as azure web app - content not showing on site

I've got an umbraco site which I deploy to an azure web app service. The data is on an azure sql database. I have been able to deploy this successfully, and can verify that all the data I expect to be there is present in the content view.
However I have added content on various pages, in rich text editors, and on my local site I can see this content on the site. But on my deployed site the content in rich text editors is only visible on the content view, not on the site. I've tried publishing each item but nothing will appear.
What else can I try?
Umbraco needs some additional configuration to be treated properly on Azure. It especially affects indexes and XML caching file.
Please check the following blog post made by one of the Umbraco HQ Core developers - Sebastiaan Janssen: https://cultiv.nl/blog/making-sure-your-umbraco-site-performs-on-azure/. Go step by step to ensure if your app is properly configured.
Going further you may be in need to also ensure proper configuration for load balancing, which you can find here: https://our.umbraco.org/documentation/getting-started/setup/server-setup/load-balancing/flexible
I found the answer after a much experimenting.
I had not manually included in my project (and thus not deploying) Views/Partials/Grid/fanoe.cshtml. This file includes the and I guess I was using some default template which is using this file, rather than the other grid templates in the same folder.

Liferay create site / page programmatically

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.

Two portlets with same database

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.

Setting up a new website with Liferay Portal - basic steps?

I know this is not specifically a programming question, but programmers will often have to do this work.
How do I create a website with Liferay portal - the docs are pretty light on this fundamental issue and are all for version 4.4. I am using version 5.2 and the docs don't seem to be relevant.
Do you know what the basic steps are. So far I have logged in as the bruno user and can see the 7cogs website and edit it. But I now need to create my own website (for my company) and be able to develop portlets to add to the parts of the page.
Further I notice that the docs talk about doing work in Eclipse. If our website is all static HTML, (the reason we want liferay is mainly so that we can edit content items using its content management tools), then will there be any need for Java dev, or will it all be drag n drop and clicking to get setup. Any guidance will be much appreciated.
Liferay can be used as a simple CMS, without much Java knowledge : creating, editing and positioning of web content fragments are drag'n'drop and use of the included rich text editor.
But to start using Liferay for your company, there are two main steps : a technical configuration (database, etc.), and a look'n'feel customization.
The technical part
First of all, you should get rid of the 7cogs website : this is called a hook in the Liferay wording. To do that, if you are using Tomcat for the application server, just delete the 7cogs directory as stated here.
You can now create the configuration file for your installation : it's a simple text properties file, named portal-ext.properties and placed in the webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/classes folder of your tomcat installation.
This file handles most of the configuration of the Liferay portal, for example :
the name of your company
if you want to display a terms of use page on first login
if you want anybody to be able to create an account on your portal
the database where the data will be stored
To do this, the properties in the portal-ext.properties override default properties found in a embedded portal.properties file located in the jar file portal-impl.jar, in the webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib directory. Just unzip the jar file in a temporary folder to access the portal.properties file.
A sample portal-ext.properties file :
company.default.web.id=yourcompany.com
terms.of.use.required=false
company.security.strangers=false
jdbc.default.driverClassName=com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
jdbc.default.url=jdbc:mysql://localhost/lportal?useUnicode=true&characterEncoding=UTF-8&useFastDateParsing=false
jdbc.default.username=root
jdbc.default.password=root
Once done, you can startup your application server. As the default admin (named test, something you can change in the portal-ext.properties file), you can access to the centralized web "control center", located in the "dock" (the strange menu labelled "welcome Test" in the upper right part of any page once logged in).
I would advise you to read the administration guide, useful for most administrative tasks.
The "branding" part
Liferay uses "Themes" to automatically decorate the portal pages (logo, navigation, portlet borders...) using images, CSS, Javascript (JQuery) and the templating language Velocity. The themes are bundled in a .war file, like a standard web application, and deployed on the fly either via the control center or by dropping the file in the deploy directory of the server.
Liferay can use several themes at the same time, one for each community (a group of pages, users and content) for example.
Creating your own theme can be done afterwards, using the "Plugins SDK".
The Wiki, forums and blogs can be very useful.

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