Portlets Plugin

Please create an issue in JIRA under the Grails-Portlets component if you find problems or come up with ideas for enhancements.

Overview

This plugin aims to provide a simple (grails) way of developing JSR-168 portlets using well known Grails conventions that can be deployed to compliant Portal servers. Currently Liferay 5.2 and Pluto 1.1.7 are supported.

JSR-286 will be supported once springframework bundled with Grails is upgraded to 3.0. spring-mvc-portlet 2.5.6 doesn't support JSR-286.

Portlets plugin consists of "grails-portlets-plugin" generating JSR-168 compliant configuration files, "grails-portlets-liferay" for Liferay specific configurations, "grails-portlets-pluto" for Pluto specific configuration, "grails-pluto", which adds pluto runtime to grails and launch the container with "run-app" command, and "grails-liferay-exploded", allowing a dynamic reloading of classes and GSPs on a stand-alone Liferay server.

"grails-portlets-plugin" doesn't provide a container specific support so it won't work unless implementation specific plugin such as "grails-portlets-liferay" or "grails-portlets-pluto" is installed. "Portlets" plugin is automatically installed by installing those plugins.

You can generate container specific portlet war file by installing "portlets-liferay" or "portlets-pluto". "liferay-exploded" or "pluto" allows to test with those portal container from grails environment.

Installation

Portlets plugin should be implicitly installed by installing a container specific portlets plugin.

Liferay portlets

export LIFERAY_HOME=/your_path_to/liferay-portlet-5.2.2
grails install-plugin portlets-liferay
grails install-plugin liferay-exploded

Pluto portlets

grails install-plugin portlets-pluto  
grails install-plugin pluto

Create a portlet

grails create-portlet MyFirst

The command generates a portlet file "grails-app/portlets/MyFirstPortlet.groovy" as following.

import javax.portlet.*
class MyFirstPortlet {
  def title = 'Portlet Title'
  def description = '''
Description about the portlet goes here.
'''
  def displayName = 'Display Name'
  def supports = ['text/html':['view', 'edit', 'help']]
// Liferay server specific configurations                 
  def liferay_display_category = 'MyCategory'
  def actionEdit = {
    //TODO Define action phase
    portletResponse.setPortletMode(PortletMode.VIEW) 
  }
  def renderEdit = {
    //TODO Define render phase. Return the map of the variables bound to the view
    ['mykey':'myvalue']
  }
  def actionView = {
    //TODO Define action phase
  }
  def renderView = {
    //TODO Define render phase. Return the map of the variables bound to the view
    ['mykey':'myvalue']
  }
  def actionHelp = {
    //TODO Define action phase
    portletResponse.setPortletMode(PortletMode.VIEW) 
  }
  def renderHelp = {
    //TODO Define render phase. Return the map of the variables bound to the view
    ['mykey':'myvalue']
  }
}

"actionXXX" is invoked when a form is submitted, and "renderXXX" is invoked when the page is rendered.

The following variables are bound to the portlet class.

To generate views, run the following command.

grails generate-portlet-views MyFirst

It generates edit.gsp, help.gsp, and view.gsp under "grails-app/views/myfirst" directory. View.gsp looks like this. Please note portletRequest and portletResponse are bound to the GSP.

<%@ taglib uri="http://java.sun.com/portlet" prefix="portlet" %>
<div>
<h1>View Page</h1>
The map returned by renderView is passed in. Value of mykey: ${mykey}
<form action="${portletResponse.createActionURL()}">
    <input type="submit" value="Submit"/>
</form>
</div>

Deploy to container

You can generate portlet war file just same as a servlet war file.

grails war

Please follow the instruction of the portlet container to deploy the portlet war file.

Pluto

Liferay

1. Run a deployment command. It generates a war, expand, and copy context.xml

grails liferay-deploy

1. Monitor the console output, and confirm the servlet is successfully

(liferay1 is the name of a sample portlet war file)
…
21:33:16,176 INFO  [PortletHotDeployListener:219] Registering portlets for liferay1
21:33:18,050 INFO  [PortletHotDeployListener:303] 2 portlets for liferay1 are available for use
...

Once you deploy, you can change the code in the grails projects, and reflect the changes to the running Liferay server by invoking the following command.

grails liferay-update

For the details, please refer to Liferay exploded plugin.

"liferay-exploded" plugin is designed for development purposes only. It utilizes tomcat's hot deployment feature, but due to a memory leak on reloading, you will get OutOfMemoryError after four or five executions of "liferay-update". For production, please deploy the packaged war through Liferay's deploy directory or administration GUI.

Unit Testing

Functional Testing

Known Issues

Reference

Configuration

def title = 'HelloWorld'
def displayName = 'Grails Hello World Portlet'
def supports = ['*/*':['view', 'edit']]

There are portal container specific properties too. Please consult portlets-liferay and portlets-pluto plugins for the details.

Portlet Information

title (mandatory)

description

displayName (mandatory)

shortTitle

keywords

Portlet Mode

supports (mandatory)

customModes

Portlet Preferences

supportedPreferences

Security

roleRefs

Custom Window States

customWindowStates

Internationalization

Action Conventions

Simple case

Portlet mode based action

parameter based action

actionView = {
    if(portletRequest.getParameter('action') == 'foo') {
        actionFoo()
    }
}
private actionFoo() {
    …
}

View Conventions

Convenience properties

Request/Response

portletRequest

portletResponse

request

response

Portlet Session

session

Portlet Preferences

preferences

Window State

windowState

Portlet Mode

mode

History

0.7 (11/4/09)

• Got rid of unused Jetty import statements.

0.5 (09/22/09)

• Added commons-logging-1.1.1.jar to fix the deployment issue on liferay-5.2.3 with tomcat-6 due to listener registration failure.

0.4 (06/30/09)

• Fixed unbalanced curly bracket in gsp template files.

0.3 (05/28/09)

• Updated gsp template so that submission works on both pluto and liferay.
• Added liferay_display_category field to the template so that you can generate

0.2 (05/25/09)