How to create listerners for Custom entity in liferay? - liferay

Question

I have created custom entity employee. Now I want to add listeners for this entity so that I can track add/edit/delete employee operations.
In Liferay for portal enitites like Blogs, Group, User etc we can add properties like
value.object.listener.com.liferay.portal.model.Group=com.smb.test.hook.listeners.GroupListener
in portal.properties via hook-plugin.
But for custom entity this approach does not seem to work.
Any help would be appreciated.

Answer 1

For custom entity, we need to add the listener property in service-ext.properties instead of the portal.properties file.
For my employee entity I have added following property in service-ext.properties file:
value.object.listener.com.smb.employee.model.Employee=com.smb.employee.hook.listeners.EmployeeListener
Note: We need to manually create service-ext.properties file in src folder besides the service.properties file. We could have updated service.properties but since it auto-generates our changes would be lost and hence service-ext.properties is the correct liferay approach.
Here is the location of the service-ext.properties file:
Here is my service.xml:
<service-builder package-path="com.smb.employee">
<author>Suyash</author>
<namespace>smb</namespace>
<entity name="Employee" local-service="true" remote-service="true">
<!-- PK fields -->
<column name="fooId" type="long" primary="true" />
<!-- Audit fields -->
<column name="companyId" type="long" />
<column name="userId" type="long" />
<column name="userName" type="String" />
<column name="createDate" type="Date" />
<column name="modifiedDate" type="Date" />
<!-- Other fields -->
<column name="field1" type="String" />
<column name="field2" type="boolean" />
<column name="field3" type="int" />
<column name="field4" type="Date" />
<column name="field5" type="String" />
<!-- Order -->
<order by="asc">
<order-column name="field1" />
</order>
<!-- Finder methods -->
<finder name="Field2" return-type="Collection">
<finder-column name="field2" />
</finder>
</entity>
</entity>
</service-builder>