Propertiesdoc - Liferay's Properties Files in HTML

Have you wanted to find a listing of the properties available to you via Liferay Portal's properties files? Have you wanted to view the property definitions in a nicer format, instead of as plain text ? Good news! Liferay Portal's property file properties are now available online and offline in HTML for easy lookup.

We now provide Propertiesdoc--marked up versions of our properties files--along with our normal set of Javadocs, Taglibs, and definitions (DTDs) that you've come to know and love.

For your online reading pleasure, you'll find a propertiesdoc directory for the 6.1 and 6.2 (beta) version of Liferay Portal CE on http://docs.liferay.com. It has links to the portal.properties and system.properties files containing Portal's default properties, and it has links to the liferay-plugin-package-<version>.properties file(s) giving you definitions for the properties you can use in your plugins.

For your offline reading pleasure, you'll find the equivalent propertiesdoc directory and files in the liferay-portal-doc-<version>.zip file you download for Liferal Portal EE or CE.

Let's take the nickel tour of Portal's Propertiesdocs. For example, let's find out what Liferay Portal 6.2 (beta) uses for ORM persistence defaults and what options we can specify.

Start by opening your browser to the http://docs.liferay.com/portal/6.2/propertiesdoc directory or propertiesdoc folder of the liferay-portal-doc-<version>.zip file you extracted. The propertiesdoc folder lists the following Liferay Portal properties files as shown in the figure below:

Click on the portal.properties link to see it's Table of Contents. You'll find there's a Persistence section listed as shown circled in the picture below.

Click on the Persistence section link so we can look at the persistence properties. In this section to find the persistence.provider property listed. It has a description that mentions the options you can specify for your portal's persistence provider. Below the description, notice the property's default value highlighted in gray. And an example value for the property is highlighted in light green. See the picture below.

When you're done looking at this property and want to look up some more Portal props, simply click the Top of Page link and you're brought back to the Table of Contents.

We hope providing you with this Propertiesdocs help you learn about and use Liferay Portal's properties more easily.

Special thanks to Jesse Rao who developed the converter, Hugo Huijser and Brian Chan for their reviews and assistance, and Chas Austin for making sure the propertiesdoc is built with our releases.

 

[Vilmos Kozma]

How about making a commented xsd for all types of xmls the portal uses? Installing it into Liferay IDE would serve as superior solution in both validation and reference. At least, for those using IDE... (about 98% of developers)

[Jim Hinkey]

Vilmos, we do have DTD's listed for some of our XML files. And these DTD's are available in HTML form in the definitions/ directory on docs.liferay.com for each release (e.g., http://docs.liferay.com/portal/6.1/definitions/). And I believe Liferay IDE uses them.

Which XML files would you really like to see defined? Thanks for the feedback.

[Vilmos Kozma]

Most certainly, I would like to see them all defined, portlet-model-hints.xml as well for example.

But don't get me wrong my primary complain is that Liferay does not leverage the power laying in xsd files. Check out the dtd coming for service.xml and try to use its "documentation" from a GUI. You won't be successful. Or, let's assume you are in you favorite IDE and try to determine the possible values for the "type" attribute on the column element. Not possible with dtd. Where is a well structured list? Nowhere. Do I really have to check the source all the time I'm trying to use something not usual? Or, do you find the comment above "column" and "column attrs" well organized? Why it is not well organized? Because it is dtd. You can't do that with dtd.

But for what I'am most angry is that you can't say any good reason to stick to dtds. This has nothing to do with DB/OS/App Server/ JVM agnostic issues. It is only because you don't take the time. I guess, many of you (probably in decision position) don't even know the advantages.

[Vilmos Kozma]

And just one more hint:

Best documentation is available "inline", right where the need comes. This boosts productivity. That is which could be easily delivered with xsd-s.

[Vilmos Kozma]

Sorry for that, but one more comment:

I guess you are even loosing potential experienced developers how are well avare the differeces between dtd and xsd. They might not choose Liferay because they think that this portal is based on too old technologies. Consider this one too.