Utilize Organization selection in custom portlet - liferay

I want to use Liferay's Organization select/search feature such as when adding a new user through the Control Panel (under Users and Organizations).
Does anyone know where that code lives? Trying to get a grasp on navigating their source code but can't find it.
Thanks

All the liferay OOTB portlets' JSPs lie in the folder portal-web/docroot/html/portlet.
And all the implementation classes (service implementation) reside in the portal-impl/src/com/liferay/portlet for respective portlets.
So keeping this convention in mind, the JSPs for the Users & Organization would reside in portal-web/docroot/html/portlet/users_admin since you can't see any folder with the name users or organizations or users_organization, so your best bet is to look inside the users_admin folder, also because this folder has user & organization folder which include specific JSPs for Users and Organizations.
In this folder you would find different *search.jsp & *search_results.jsp which would be what you might be looking for.
I would suggest always start looking from the view.jsp for a particular portlet since this is the first landing page when we add the portlet to the page or click on any Control Panel portlets the first time. Most probably this view.jsp would include all the other JSPs which you might want to customize or take an idea from.
Most of the time the JSPs lead you to the implementation classes, we can't use liferay's implementation classes (since they live in portal-impl.jar and using this jar in plugin-portlets is prohibited) but we can use the different *Util.java classes which are exposed for our use like the UserLocalServiceUtil, OrganizationLocalServiceUtil, OrganizationServiceUtil etc.
Hope this gives a clue to finding out Liferay implementations.

Related

Liferay: How can I get the pages of the site in a web content?

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).

Liferay: Page to portlet mapping

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.

Liferay or GateIn

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 Liferay for an already developed project

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.

LIFERAY PROJECTS ?Should we create diffrent projects for every section?

I am about to develop one liferay projects and have some query regarding that as follows..
should we create a different portlet project per section or we should combine all section in single portlet project?
we have a different section like "Campaign","Advertise" etc now each section is interconnected,
i mean to say in i would be able to display list of advertise mapped with particular portlet. can please guide me?
I think by section you mean Categories in the Add more section that appears in the dockbar at top-left corner of the portal page.
It is not mandatory to create different portlet projects that go in different categories. It is purely your choice keeping in mind future management.
Following are some considerations to keep all the portlets in one project:
If the portlets are going to use each others services
The portlets will depend on each other for showing the same or similar data, like take for eg: Documents & Media portlet and Documents & Media display portlet would go in one project.
I would say to keep in mind the Software Design Principle of Cohesion and Loose coupling.
This is what I can think at the moment. Hope this helps you in taking your own decision.
Try and put all Portlets under one Project. So that deploy is easy because basically the config files (like, liferay-portlet.tld, liferay-portlet-ext.tld) will be same.
You might wanna make different projects for code that's not about portlets.
I mean different project for Theme, or UI class, different one under Services/Server Side Java code, different for database config/connections etc.
All portlets could go under one project for above mentioned reason.
And you can still have separate space / loose coupling inside this one big portlet project because your (javascript/whichever tech you're using) code will be in separate folders.
About your question of displaying a particular list inside of the portlet, I guess it depends on how you want to code inside that portlet to show your list.
I agree with Prakash K.
Moreover, you should need to have two portlets in the same project (and with "project", I hear "war") if you need to share private portletsessions. So, as Prakash said, if you need interactions between 2 portlets, use one single project.
You can find more information about this particular point in this great blog (not mine): Liferay session sharing demystified

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