UE Development Tips

Toggling Aggregation

uPortal 3.2 aggregates and minifies both JavaScript and CSS files, and sets cache headers on these resources. While these techniques improve browser performance for uPortal users, it can be difficult to debug and perform active development in such an environment.

To aid user experience developers, uPortal includes a portlet named "Toggle Aggregation" that allows an administrator to turn off aggregation and minification. These unminified files are also exempt from uPortal's normal caching rules.

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.