Service Builder 6.2 Migration

I'm taking a short hiatus from the design pattern series to cover a topic I've heard a lot of questions on lately - migrating 6.2 Service Builder wars to Liferay 7 CE / Liferay DXP.

Basically it seems you have two choices:

  1. You can keep the Service Builder implementation in a portlet war. Any wars you keep going forward will have access to the service layer, but can you access the services from other OSGi components?
  2. You take the Service Builder code out into an OSGi module. With this path you'll be able to access the services from other OSGi modules, but will the services be available to the legacy portlet wars?

So it's that mixed usage that leads to the questions. I mean, if all you have is either legacy wars or pure OSGi modules, the decision is easy - stick with what you've got.

But when you are in mixed modes, how do you deliver your Service Builder code so both sides will be happy?

The Scenario

So we're going to work from the following starting point. We have a 6.2 Service Builder portlet war following a recommendation that I frequently give, the war has only the Service Builder implementation in it and nothing else, no other portlets. I often recommend this as it gives you a working Service Builder implementation and no pollution from Spring or other libraries that can sometimes conflict with Service Builder. We'll also have a separate portlet war that leverages the Service Builder service.

Nothing fancy for the code, the SB layer has a simple entity, Course, and the portlet war will be a legacy Liferay MVC portlet that lists the courses.

We're tasked with upgrading our code to Liferay 7 CE or Liferay DXP (pick your poison cheeky), and as part of the upgrade we will have a new OSGi portlet component using the new Liferay MVC framework for adding a course.

To reduce our development time, we will upgrade our course list portlet to be compatible with Liferay 7 CE / Liferay DXP but keep it as a portlet war - basically the minimal effort needed to get it upgraded. We'll also have the new portlet module for adding a course.

But our big development focus, and the focus of this blog, will be choosing the right path for upgrading that Service Builder portlet war.

For evaluation purposes we're going to have to upgrade the SDK to a Liferay Workspace. Doing so will help get us some working 7.x portlet wars initially, and then when it comes time to do the testing for the module it should be easy to migrate.

Upgrading to a Liferay Workspace

So the Liferay IDE version 3.1 Milestone 2 is available, and it has the Code Upgrade Assistant to help take our SDK project and migrate it to a Liferay Workspace.

For this project, I've made the original 6.2 SDK project available at https://github.com/dnebing/sb-upgrade-62-sdk.

You can find an intro to the upgrade assistant in Greg Amerson's blog: https://web.liferay.com/web/gregory.amerson/blog/-/blogs/liferay-ide-3-1-milestone-1-released and Andy Wu's blog: https://web.liferay.com/web/andy.wu/blog/-/blogs/liferay-ide-3-1-milestone-2-released.

It is still a milestone release so it is still a work in progress, but it does work on upgrading my sample SDK. Just a note, though, it does take some processing time during the initial upgrade to a workspace; if you think it has locked up or is unresponsive, just have patience. It will come back, it will complete, you just have to give it time to do it's job.

Checkpoint

After you finish the upgrade, you should have a Liferay workspace w/ a plugins-sdk directory and inside there is the normal SDK directory structure. In the portlet directory the two portlet war projects are there and they are ready for deployment.

In fact, in the plugins-sdk/dist directory you should find both of the wars just waiting to be deployed. Deploy them to your new Liferay 7 CE or Liferay DXP environment, then spin out and drop the Course List portlet on a page and you should see the same result as the 6.2 version.

So what have we done so far? We upgraded our SDK to a Liferay Workspace and the Code Upgrade Assistant has upgraded our code to be ready for Liferay 7 CE / Liferay DXP. The two portlet wars were upgraded and built. When we deployed them to Liferay, the WAR -> WAB conversion process converted our old wars into OSGi bundles.

However, if you go into the Gogo shell and start digging around, you won't find the services defined from our Service Builder portlet. Obviously they are there because the Course List portlet uses it to get the list of courses.

War-Based Service Builder

So how do these war-based Service Builder upgrades work? If you take a look at the CourseLocalServiceUtil's getService() method, you'll see that it uses the good ole' PortletBeanLocator and the registered Spring beans for the Service Builder implementation. The Util classes use the PortletBeanLocator to find the service implementations and may leverage the class loader proxies (CLP) if necessary to access the Spring beans from other contexts. From the service war perspective, it's going through Liferay's Spring bean registry to get access to the service implementations.

Long story short, our service jar is still a service jar. It is not a proper OSGi module and cannot be deployed as one. But the question is, can we still use it?

OSGi Add Course Portlet

So we need an OSGi portlet to add courses. Again this will be another simple portlet to show a form and process the submit. Creating the module is pretty straight forward, the challenge of course is including the service jar into the bundle.

First thing that is necessary is to include the jar into the build.gradle dependencies. Since it is not in a Maven-like repository, we'll need to use a slightly different syntax to include the jar:

dependencies {
  compileOnly group: "com.liferay.portal", name: "com.liferay.portal.kernel", version: "2.0.0"
  compileOnly group: "com.liferay.portal", name: "com.liferay.util.taglib", version: "2.0.0"
  compileOnly group: "javax.portlet", name: "portlet-api", version: "2.0"
  compileOnly group: "javax.servlet", name: "javax.servlet-api", version: "3.0.1"
  compileOnly group: "jstl", name: "jstl", version: "1.2"
  compileOnly group: "org.osgi", name: "osgi.cmpn", version: "6.0.0"
	
  compile files('../../plugins-sdk/portlets/school-portlet/docroot/WEB-INF/lib/school-portlet-service.jar')
}

The last line is the key; it is the syntax for including a local jar file, and in our case we're pointing at the service jar which is part of the plugins-sdk folder that we upgraded.

Additionally we need to add the stanza to the bnd.bnd file so the jar gets included into the bundle during the build:

Bundle-ClassPath:\
  .,\
  lib/school-portlet-service.jar

-includeresource:\
  lib/school-portlet-service.jar=school-portlet-service.jar

As you'll remember from my blog post on OSGi Module Dependencies, this is option #4 to include the jar into the bundle itself and use it in the classpath for the bundle.

Now if you build and deploy this module, you can place the portlet on a page and start adding courses.  It works!

By including the service jar into the module, we are leveraging the same PortletBeanLocator logic used in the Util class to get access to the service layer and invoke services via the static Util classes.

Now that we know that this is possible (we'll discuss whether to do it this way in the conclusion), let's now rework everything to move the Service Builder code into a set of standard OSGi modules.

Migrating Service Builder War to Bundle

Our service builder code has already been upgraded when we upgraded the SDK, so all we need to do here is create the modules and then move the code.

Creating the Clean Modules

First step is to create a clean project in our Liferay workspace, a foundation for the Service Builder modules to build from.

Once again, I start with Blade since I'm an Intellij developer. In modules directory, we'll let Blade create our Service Builder projects:

blade create -t service-builder -p com.liferay.school school

For the last argument, use something that reflects your current Service Builder project name.

This is the clean project, so let's start dirtying it up a bit.

Copy your legacy service.xml to the school/school-service directory.

Build the initial Service Builder code from the service XML. If you're on the command line, you'd do:

../../gradlew buildService

Now we have unmodified, generated code. Layer in the changes from the legacy Service Builder portlet, including:

  • portlet-model-hints.xml
  • service.properties
  • Changes to any of the META-INF/spring xml files
  • All of your Impl java classes

Rebuild services again to get the working module code.

Module-Based Service Builder

So we reviewed how the CourseLocalServiceUtil's getService() method in the war-based service jar leveraged the PortletBeanLocator to find the Spring bean registered with Liferay to get the implementation class.

In our OSGi module-based version, the CourseLocalServiceUtil's getService() method is instead using an OSGi ServiceTracker to get access to the DS components registered in OSGi for the implementation class.

Again the service "jar" is still a service jar (well, module), but we also know that the add course portlet will be able to leverage the service (with some modifications), the question of course is whether we can also use the service API module in our legacy course list portlet.

Fixing the Course List Portlet War

So what remains is modifying the course list portlet so it can leverage the API module in lieu of the legacy Service Builder portlet service jar.

This change is actually quite easy...

The liferay-plugin-package.properties file changed from the upgrade assistant contains the following:

required-deployment-contexts=\
    school-portlet

This is the line used by the Liferay IDE to inject the service jar so the service will be available to the portlet war. We need to edit this line to strip out these two lines since we're not using the deployment context.

If you have the school-portlet-service.jar file in docroot/WEB-INF/lib, go ahead and delete that file since it is no longer necessary.

Next comes the messy part; we need to copy in the API jar into the course list portlet's WEB-INF/lib directory. We have to do this so Eclipse will be happy and will be able to happily compile all of our code that uses the API. There's no easy way to do this, but I can think of the following options:

  1. Manually copy the API jar over.
  2. Modify the Gradle build scripts to add support for the install of artifacts into the local Maven repo, then the Ivy configuration for the project can be adjusted to include the dependency. Not as messy as a manual file copy, but involves doing the install of the API jar so Ivy can find it.

We're not done there... We actually cannot keep the jar in WEB-INF/lib otherwise at runtime you get class cast exceptions, so we need to exclude it during deployment. This is easily handled, however, by adding an exclusion to your portal-ext.properties file:

module.framework.web.generator.excluded.paths=<CURRENT EXCLUSIONS>,\
  WEB-INF/lib/com.liferay.school.api-1.0.0.jar

When the WAR->WAB conversion is taking place, it will exclude this jar from being included. So you get to keep it in the project and let the WAB conversion strip it out during deployment.

Remember to keep all of the current excluded paths in the list, you can find them in the portal.properties file included in your Liferay source.

Build and deploy your new war and it should access the OSGi-based service API module.

Conclusion

Well, this ended up being a mixed bag...

On one hand I've shown that you can use the Service Builder portlet's service jar as a direct dependency in the module and it can invoke the service through the static Util classes defined within. The advantage of sticking with this path is that it really doesn't require much modification from your legacy code beyond completing the code upgrade, and the Liferay IDE's Code Upgrade Assistant gets you most of the way there. The obvious disadvantage is that you're now adding a dependency to the modules that need to invoke the service layer and the deployed modules include the service jar; so if you change the service layer, you're going to have to rebuild and redeploy all modules that have the service jar as an embedded dependency.

On the other hand I've shown that the migrated OSGi Service Builder modules can be used to eliminate all of the service jar replication and redeployment pain, but the hoops you have to jump through for the legacy portlet access to the services are a development-time pain.

It seems clear, at least to me, that the second option is the best. Sure you will incur some development-time pain to copy service API jars if only to keep the java compiler happy when compiling code, but it definitely has the least impact when it comes to service API modifications.

So my recommendations for migrating your 6.2 Service Builder implementations to Liferay 7 CE / Liferay DXP are:

  • Use the Liferay IDE's Code Upgrade Assistant to help migrate your code to be 7-compatible.
  • Move the Service Builder code to OSGi modules.
  • Add the API jars to the legacy portlet's WEB-INF/lib directory for those portlets which will be consuming the services.
  • Add the module.framework.web.generator.excluded.paths entry to your portal-ext.properties to strip the jar during WAR->WAB conversion.

If you follow these recommendations your legacy portlet wars will be able to leverage the services, any new OSGi-based portlets (or JSP fragments or ...) will be able to access the services, and your deployment impact for changes will be minimized.

My code for all of this is available in github:

Note that the upgraded code is actually in the same repo, they are just in different branches.

Good Luck!

Update

After thinking about this some more, there's actually another path that I did not consider...

For the Service Builder portlet service jar, I indicated you'd need to include this as a dependency on every module that needed to use the service, but I neglected to consider the global service jar option that we used for Liferay 6.x...

So you can keep the Service Builder implementation in the portlet, but move the service jar to the global class loader (Tomcat's lib/ext directory). Remember that with this option there can only be one service jar, the global one, so no other portlet war nor module (including the Service Builder portlet war) can have a service jar. Also remember that to update a global service jar, you can only do this while Tomcat is down.

The final step is to add the packages for the service interfaces to the module.framework.system.packages.extra property in portal-ext.properties. You want to add the packages to the current list defined in portal.properties, not replace the list with just your service packages.

Before starting Tomcat, you'll want to add the exception, model and service trio to the list. For the school service example, this would be something like:

module.framework.system.packages.extra=\
  <ALL DEFAULT VALUES COPIED IN>,\
  com.liferay.school.exception,\
  com.liferay.school.model,\
  com.liferay.school.service

This will make the contents of the packages available to the OSGi global class loader so, whether bundle or WAB, they will all have access to the interfaces and static classes.

This has a little bit of a deployment process change to go with it, but you might consider this the least impactful change of all. We tend to frown on the use of the global class loader because it may introduce transitive dependencies and does not support hot deployable updates, but this option might be lower development cost to offset the concern.

ブログ
Thanks for sharing!!
i need a suggestion in a case. While up gradation service is separated as service module from the portlet WAR. In the case if both service and portlet uses the same third party dependency then what is the suggested approach to include them. whether that third party dependency jar should be included in both plugins or there is another best approach to manage dependency jars?

Dear David,

Thanks for your great effort but for Service builder as a module, I applied all the steps but it doesn't work, it throwing class cast exception my case is, I have a service builder module and war based portlet and I can't use this module inside my war. I can compile and build but when trying to call any class in service builder module it throwing class cast exception so could you please describe more how to do it.