I am working in Liferay 6.2 EE with foresight of upgrading to DXP. I have about 2 years of Liferay development experience but it has been allin custom portlet development. A project has been drafted and I am leaning towards using a hook instead of building an entire portlet from the ground up. My reason for post this message is to 1) outline basic requirements of this project and get community input on the feasibility of developing a hook, and 2) if a hook is decided to be the credited answer I wish to get suggestions for what portlet to hook off.
This project requires the creation of a portlet (or portlet hook) with the following properties.
- Provides users with a file system structure (a hierarchy of folders and files) and the ability to add, remove, and modify that structure.
- The structure is "global" in that there is no private structure for any individual users
- We may need to implement roles and permissions to restrict the action of certain users
- We need the ability to add "meta data" to folders and files that is both searchable, customizable (we need to be able to specify our own fields), and exposed to other portlets
- Additionally, we need to have a "shortcut" or "symbolic link" concept where a user can enter a single file and then subsequently create "shortcuts" to that file in different directories.
These 'shortcuts" should not be distinguishable to the user, but the concept needs to exist because in some circumstances we need to treat the file as separate and in other instances it needs to be the treated as the same. To illustrate this example, let us assume we have a file in Folder A and a reference to that file in Folder B. Let's assume that we have to meta data fields for all files called "isAttachment" and "isActive". If we set "isAttachment" to true on the file in Folder A, it should not effect the "isAttachment" field on the file in Folder B. However, if we set "isActive" to true on the file in Folder A it needs to also automatically set to true in the file in Folder B.
I understand the the functionality outlined in italic and in the previous paragraph will not come default in any portlet. However, I am only asking if this type of functionality is within the realm of a hook or if it is too customized and would require the creation of an entire new portlet.
Also, if this is within the realm of a hook can anyone recommend a specific hook for me (it can come packaged with Liferay or on the Market Place but it needs to be free and available on 6.2 EE). Is the "document and media" portlet a good candidate? Additionally, is the "document and media" portlet the same thing as the "document_library"?
Thanks in advance!!
