Unmatched Layout Region

[patrickdalla]

There is any tag in layout tag api that can be used to place portlets with unmatched region names?

[mholzner]

nope, no such tag exists so far
the problem I see is that the region tag is the one that filters the available portlets for a match, so only the tag is the one that knows the region. The layoutitself has no idea of this. Perhaps we could add some sort of expression language: <p:region regionName="${NOT IN ('left', 'right', 'center')"}"

No idea how complex this would be. EL might be the way to go. I haven't looked into EL and the extension possibilities...

anyone ?

[patrickdalla]

It would be nice to create a declarative way of defining regions of a layout (in a xml descriptor).

So, a java application could recognize regions at runtime and would be possible to place portlets at runtime too.

[mholzner]

A layout currently is nothing but a servlet or jsp. It sounds to me as if what you want is maximum flexibility. I'd recommend a servlet that builds the page as an xml document, and at the end styles that document with an xsl style. This allows you to import, mix and mingle as much as you want. The tricky part are the fragments that are not xml (nhtml). you need to import them into the page doc as CDATA sections, and the xsl needs to still render them into the final response. I'm thinking of a demo of that kind for JBossWorld.

[patrickdalla]

I've seen that exists a portal-layout.xml. In this file could be declared the layout regions. An which portlet decoration would be used for each region.

[mholzner]

is this a question or a statement ?

Anyway: sorry, you're wrong. The portal-layout.xml only allows you to define the URI to the JSP or Servlet that is to be used as the layout, and the strategy and the render set to use for that layout (both are optional)

* regions are assigned in the page definition
* decoration is done via
a) the decoration jsp (see the nodesk theme), or
b) via the render set (that can be set per portal, or per layout)

[patrickdalla]

This is a suggestion for a way to declare regions and to know at runtime which and how many regions does a layout have.