Portal or Portlet Configuration

[Trever Shick, modificado hace 12 años.]

We have a Liferay server in production that's been running fine for quite some time now, with portlets that communicate with backend servers for data (REST based services,etc).

Up to this point, we've been using JNDI to store the endpoint URLs and other configuration information that is 'server-wide'. This has served us well. However, portlet development is picking up and using JNDI causes us to have to modify Tomcat's server.xml and restart the server whenever a portlet has a new configuration parameter.

Obviously this is less than optimal.

I'm going thru and doing some up front work to determine the level of effort of migrating a 5.1.6 based code base to 6.0.12 (EE). It's fairly simple, but I have the opportunity to make our configuration 'better'.

It seems like using 'PortalPreferences' (portal not portlet) might work but I'm looking for a little guidance here. We do NOT use the ext environment. I don't want to add custom db tables. I want to be able to configure these values server wide via the control panel (I understand how to do that) but i'm not sure that PortalPreferences is the way to go there. The documentation is abysmal around PortalPreferences so i'm looking for a little help from the community.

Please help.

Thanks

Trever

[Tomáš Polešovský, modificado hace 12 años.]

Trever,

there are more ways you can go and PortalPreferences is a good way to have portal-wide settings. But I'm not sure if you can edit it OOTB in the ControlPanel.

In your case it make sense to have your settings together with Liferay portal settings. I'm copying com.liferay.portal.util.PrefsPropsUtil.getPreferences method which returns portal preferences in 6.0.6. Hope it will work the same in 6.0.12 (don't have sources now).

 	public static PortletPreferences getPreferences(long companyId)
		throws SystemException {

		long ownerId = companyId;
		int ownerType = PortletKeys.PREFS_OWNER_TYPE_COMPANY;
		long plid = PortletKeys.PREFS_PLID_SHARED;
		String portletId = PortletKeys.LIFERAY_PORTAL;

		return PortletPreferencesLocalServiceUtil.getPreferences(
			companyId, ownerId, ownerType, plid, portletId);
	}

PortletPreferences is JSR-168/286 object, you can work with them as usual.

[Trever Shick, modificado hace 12 años.]

Thanks. I'll give that a try.

What would the companyId be? Since this is portal wide, it's the same for everyone.

I assume i'll have to build a portlet to manage the preferences within the control panel. I'm fine with that.

[Trever Shick, modificado hace 12 años.]

So, this does appear to work. However, I am unable to call .store() on the preferences object.

In 6.0.5 it checked to see if the portletId was LIFERAY_PORTAL, if it is, then it skipped locating validators. However, 6.0.12 apparently removed this check. Since LIFERAY_PORTAL doesn't return a portlet instance, an NPE is occurring within the code. Due to this I had to call PortletPreferencesLocalServiceUtil.updatePreferences. This seems to work now.

Thanks

[Tomáš Polešovský, modificado hace 12 años.]

In 6.0 EE SP2 you have PortalPreferencesLocalServiceUtil.

It would be better to use this service and I think it won't cause NPE

[Trever Shick, modificado hace 12 años.]

Makes sense. I'll give that a try and report back. Thank you for your help.