Further Learnings on Open Source Portals

It's been a while since I have updated this knowledge sharing blog as my developments and research into Liferay has been put on hold due to the end of my freelance project.
Thank everyone who have taken the interest and time to read, discuss and help me through my explorations of Liferay.
For anyone who wants to look deeper into Java open source portals, reading is always a good media. I, myself, have read many books in my life and I have benefited much from all the knowledge and wisdom of good writers.
Learn more of Java Portals, pick up a book now.

Task 3

Task:

• SSL
• Test cases for session timeout implemented in Task 2
• Change to a company-oriented GUI
• Fix task 2 bugs

Notes:

• Task 2 bug fixed.
• Found thread on SSL implementation here.
• Notes on startup interface - Login to Liferay as administrator and switch to Guest Community (in the upper right corner of the page). The application startup page is shown, and modifications can be made on the layout just like a logged in home page.

Task 2 bug fix

Bug

• My developed portlets refresh and somehow loses their sense of identity, rendering content of another portlet's.

Here's an example of what my portlet class is like:

public class BBPortlet extends StrutsPortlet {

public static final String DEFAULT_VIEW_ACTION = "/ext/bb/view";

public void init(PortletConfig config) throws PortletException {
super.init(config);

if (Validator.isNull(viewAction)) {
viewAction = DEFAULT_VIEW_ACTION;
}
}

}

I did read through the JSR-168 specs and was about to do a total revamp of my portlet classes when I realized this viewAction variable is nowhere declared. This if (Validator.isNull(viewAction)) line is actually quite standard across the struts portlets in Liferay and I had taken it for granted. What the heck, I tried commenting it out and did re-deployed. Voila! Everything works fine now and all the portlets are rendering the right content. Lesson learnt.

Task 2 - Milestone 2

Task:

• Authentication and Session Management
• variable session timeout for different user/groups
• 10min grains - no timeout
  
• one session only per loginID
• prompt for session overwrite
• User Login Management Portlet
• manage users' session time out
• tracks the users login/logout history
• force log out of users

Developed portlet for managing session timeout values so every user group would have a customizable timeout. Default timeout from properties will used if timeout for usergroup is not defined. Decided to allow free input of timeout instead of 10min grains. No point running a list, more flexible with a textfield. session_timeout.jsp has been modified to run a query to find the session timeout from DB instead of using default immediately.

Audit Trail module and search portlet done up.

Learnings

Managing Persistence with Liferay.

• Liferay's service builder is relatively simple to use. Just fill up service.xml and do a "ant build-service" to auto generate all the persistence classes. Update impl and model classes, run ant again, and you're done with the persistence classes. There's even a "ant build-db" to generate the sql scripts for the new tables. Comprehensive tutorial here.
• At times, there would be the need for custom queries that the service builder does not take care of. I've had the need to join tables for the query of user group session timeouts, and luckily enough, there's another comprehensive tutorial that enlightened me on this aspect. Here's the good stuff.

Bugs

• The hibernate DAO types provided by Liferay are incomplete and I had to do up my own TimestampType for the sake of my audit trail module. Why provide some types only and not all? Hope Liferay makes it complete on the next major release. Things should not be done halfway, eh?
• I was more of less done until I did my testing and found this crazy bug. My developed portlets refresh and somehow loses their sense of identity, rendering content of another portlet's. This is by far the biggest problem so far, and can any kind souls help me out. Please view my posting on Liferay developer forums. I'm currently reading up on JSR Specs to see what went wrong. :(

Met my boss anyway. I can't wait till the bug is fixed. It would just take too long. I'm ready for task 3.

Task 2 - Progress

Task:

• Authentication and Session Management
• variable session timeout for different user/groups
• 10min grains - no timeout
  
• one session only per loginID
• prompt for session overwrite
• User Login Management Portlet
• manage users' session time out
• tracks the users login/logout history
• force log out of users

One session per loginID is simply done by tweaking the portal properties file, portal-ext.properties
Here's the critical line to take note of. Makes very good sense actually.

auth.simultaneous.logins=false

To force log out of users would mean the kill session feature already implemented in the admin portlet. Another one down.

Now the variable timeout... hmm...