Understanding and using the Liferay Document Library - Part 2

In Part 1 of this blog post we saw some basic concepts around how document library can be used, also the database side of it like the tables being used and also the file structure.

In this post I will show you how to upload a document using Liferay's  document library API.

To get started create a MVC Portlet.

Understanding and using the Liferay Document Library - Part 1

In this two part blog post I will try to explain how to use the Liferay Document Library to store and manage your documents.

I will be using Liferay version 6.2 CE to illustrate this. Also I won't go into the meta-data details for the documents, for that you can refer to the user guide.

In the first part I will discuss some concepts related to the Document Library. Like the tables being used etc.

In the second part I will show you how to use the API from a Portlet. If you want to directly see that then here is the link.

Adding workflow to a custom portlet in Liferay 6.2

In this blog post I am going to give an overview on how you can integrate workflow feature in your portlet using Liferay API's.

Please Note: This blog will not be related to configuring out of the box Kaleo workflow portlet. By configuring I mean adding new workflows. For this please refer to the Liferay documentation.

In this post I will layout the basic steps to get workflow feature integrated in your custom portlet. I used Liferay v 6.2

Things have changed in the new Liferay version, especially the look and feel. We will discuss more about the new features in another article.

Here are the basic steps to get workflow integrated

Applying Listeners to JSR Compliant Portlets

As per the JSR 286 Specification the following Listeners, which work with Servlet Requests, can be applied to requests targeted towards Portlets.

• ServletContextListener 
• ServletContextAttributeListener
• HttpSessionActivationListener
• HttpSessionAttributeListener
• HttpSessionBindingListener
• ServletRequestListener.

For this to work the Container needs to set a variable javax.portlet.lifecycle_phase.

Lets see an example.

Comparing Servlets and Portlets Part 1 : Understanding the similarities and differences

People familiar with Servlet technology will be able to relate to Portlets. The concepts are more or less the same for both the technologies.

Lets do a quick walkthrough:

To start with the lets talk about their containers.

A container provides the environment in which the application can run. For running a servlet we will need a web application container like Tomcat.
On similar lines for a Portlet we need a Portlet Container. Most of the Portals today come with an inbuilt Portlet container to serve requests.