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XMLPortlet - For porting IChannels and new development

XMLPortlet - For porting IChannels and new development

Mar 27, 2008

edu.uiuc.cites.web.XMLPortlet

Andy Gherna (agherna@uiuc.edu)

Purpose

Provide a base class for portlets that are either:

  1. Being ported from uPortal IChannels (preserving XSL/XML developed previously)

  2. Being newly developed that want to use XML and XSL to render their views

How to build

Run ant webArchive in the root directory. This will generate dist/XMLPortlet.war.

How to deploy to uPortal

$uPortal_Home is assumed to be the base directory of your uPortal instance

  1. Copy dist/XMLPortlet.war to $uPortal_Home/lib/portlets

  2. Run ant deployPortletApp -DportletApp=$uPortal_Home/lib/portlets/XMLPortlet.war from $uPortal_Home.

Directory Structure

The recommended directory structure for portlets based on this class is close to an IChannel:

Directory

Purpose

src/

Root of source tree

bin/

Root of classes tree (generated by build.xml)

dist/

Directory to generate .war file to (generated by build.xml)

webpages/WEB-INF

Location of portlet.xml and web.xml (and other files if needed)

webpages/media

Root of tree for custom css files

webpages/xml

Root of tree for xml/xsl files

lib/

Location of external jars

Any static XML, XSL and css files should be stored under their respective directory in a tree that corresponds to the class name that uses it. For example, the view xsl for XMLPortlet would be stored under webpages/xml/edu/uiuc/cits/web/XMLPortlet/view.xsl.

Initialization Parameters for XMLPortlet

Name

Value

Purpose

under-test

true or false

Useful for testing behavior on a workstation. For example, you could use this to tell the portlet to use a test-id for a call to a remote datasource rather than the real user-id (which may not be available in test)

debug-output

true or false

Useful for sending debug output to a log (note implementing commons- logging would obviate the need for this parameter--see TODO items below)

Preferences for XMLPortlet

There are a number of preferences for XMLPortlet. The important ones are the locations of the xml and xsl files. See portlet.xml for the names and values of these preferences.

TODO Items

  1. Create a step-by-step port of an IChannel to a portlet.

  2. Create a sample new portlet with XMLPortlet.

  3. Implement translet caching via TemplatesPool (currently none is used)

  4. Implement commons-logging. This will eliminate the need for the
    debug-output parameter

  5. Document the TemplatesPool, UnavailableServiceMessage and MessageGenerator
    classes.

Contact Information

Andy Gherna
email: agherna@uiuc.edu
phone: (217) 265-9490