20 Developing in the Themes and Skins Areas of uPortal

This manual area is for documentation of how to develop uPortal themes and skins (still in a "manual style"). More open-ended discussion can and should continue outside the manual. The relationship between the more formal manual area and the less formal open ended sharing of other wiki areas is still being worked out. This page was initially created specifically as a place to document how to turn off the caching, but there's more to be documented.

Disabling caching

Disabling caching will make your portal less performant, of course, but is convenient for seeing changes you make to the theme more immediately.

Disabling Stylesheet Set Caching

uPortal uses Stylesheet List files (.ssl) to declare selection among stylesheets. This allows you to use different XSLTs for, e.g., different browsers.

By default, stylesheet sets are cached, such that if you change the declarations in a .ssl file, the changes will not take effect until portal restart. This is configured in portal.properties:

# Controls whether or not StylesheetSet objects are cached.
# Setting this to "on" improves performance, but then changes to
# any stylesheet list files (.ssl) will not take effect until
# the portal has been restarted.
#
org.jasig.portal.utils.XSLT.stylesheet_set_caching=on

Set the property to "off" to disable stylesheet set caching.

Disabling Stylesheet Caching

uPortal compiles XSLT stylesheets to improve performance. Once cached, changes to the .xsl XSLT file will have no effect until the portal is restarted. You can disable caching entirely in portal.properties. Disabling this caching will allow you to change .xsl files and experience the change on the next usage of the file, without having to first restart the portal.

# Controls whether or not pre-compiled stylesheets should be cached.
# Setting this to "on" improves performance, but then changes to
# any stylesheet files (.xsl) will not take effect until
# the portal has been restarted.
#
org.jasig.portal.utils.XSLT.stylesheet_root_caching=on

Set this property to "off" to disable stylesheet caching.