Reference to CMS Service

[patrickdalla]

I've seen that portal CMS is implemented using MBean.

But CMSPortlet access this service using:

CMSService = (CMS)getPortletContext().getAttribute("CMS");

How can I get the same reference in a diferent PortletContext, my war application.

[roy.russo]

CMS CMSService = (CMS)getPortletContext().getAttribute("CMS");

is not working?

[indyjones]

Jboss AS 4.0.3
MySQL 4.1.15
JBoss Portal 2.20

I have the same problems

 CMSService = (CMS)getPortletContext().getAttribute("CMS");

is giving me a null pointer.

I am trying to basically do the exact same thing as the CMSPorlet class...

Extend GenericPortlet and try and grab a reference to the CMS service in the int of the portlet. Throws null pointer...

Is there something I am missing? ANY help would be much appreciated!!

:)

thanks

Indy

[colintoal]

I don't know for certain (this is my understanding of 2.4 - not 2.2), but you might need to add your portlet to portlet-instances.xml and make sure that all of its dependent infrastructure services have corresponding entries in portlet-instances.xml.

In 2.4, this is how Portal knows to 'inject' a service into the context of a portlet.

Take a look at the Navigation Portlet's init() method (get's the PortalObjectContainer, and the Authorization Manager objects from context),

Then look at the corresponding 'service' entries at the bottom of the core-web.war portlet-instances.xml.

[indyjones]

JBoss AS 4.0.3
MySQL 4.1.15
JBoss POrtal 2.2.0

I am familar with how the authentication module works. It gets the context using

userModule = (UserModule)(new InitialContext()).lookup("java:/portal/UserModule");

But....the CMSPortlet uses

 CMSService = (CMS)getPortletContext().getAttribute("CMS");

Can I access the CMS service in my own Portal (myapp.war)? Or do I have to be in the default portal instance?

Thanks

Indy

[indyjones]

ok...i get it now...

To create my own CMS class that I can configure using 2.2.0, I must add it to the default Portal (portal-core) and create the instance there.

Then I can reference my custom class from my own portal instance throught the *-object.xml.

Do you see any problems with this?

Thanks

Indy

[jon_french]

I (think) you'll achieved the same results by adding jboss-portlet.xml to your war's WEB-INF directory:

<portlet-app>

<service-name>CMS</service-name>
<service-class>org.jboss.portal.cms.CMS</service-class>
<service-ref>:service=CMS</service-ref>

</portlet-app>

[colintoal]

I don't know if you have to create it in the portal-core-war. That depends on whether or not 2.2 supports portlet-instances.xml the like 2.4.

Roy, Thomas, Julien - any thoughts here? Does Portal 2.2 support the portlet-instances.xml metadata ? Is portlet-instances.xml a new facility for 2.4 ? How does one find this out without checking the source or asking the forum ?

In my Portal 2.4 portlet - I simply added a portlet-instances.xml file to my portlet's WAR and added a reference to the portlet instance and the services I needed (in particular, I redid the navigation portlet as an exercise and needed a reference to PortalObjectContainer).

In your case you'd have a tag for portlet instance, and another for the CMS service that sort of looks like an MBean descriptor with a name if I remember correctly (I'm away from my development machine at the moment).

[colintoal]

Ahh!

I think Jon is right.

I'm not familiar with 2.2 but that looks like the right approach based on what little I know. :)

[theute]

*-instances.xml and *-pages.xml of 2.0 has been replaced by -object.xml since 2.2

[indyjones]

Wow....thanks guys....

Its very clean now...

1) Create my own jboss-portlet.xml in WEB-INF of my WAR
with the following....

<portlet-app>
 <service>
 <service-name>CMS</service-name>
 <service-class>org.jboss.portal.cms.CMS</service-class>
 <service-ref>:service=CMS</service-ref>
 </service>
</portlet-app>

2) Create a typical portlet and grab the CMS Service with...

CMSService = (CMS)getPortletContext().getAttribute("CMS");

3) Give the CMS Service path to the file you need within CMS system, and whola! you have the content of the file.

Thanks Again for everyones help!!!

Indy

[colintoal]

Thomas,

So I've been doing something wrong then.

Is the preferred method for declaring a dependency on a service like the CMS Service in a jboss-portlet.xml file ?

Thanks in advance

[theute]

You can do that of use JNDI if you prefer.

By the way since we are talking about the CMS service, i am adding right now the ability to add interceptors and will provide a clustered cache as interceptor.

It will be a nice entry point to define your own behavior like logging CMS accesses and modifications or whatever you may think about. (Email warning on new or updated files... Send a SMS to your mama, when someone is watching her picture...)

[colintoal]

I'm not really worried about keeping the dependency isolated.

I think the deployment descriptor mechanism is much nicer for getting a reference to services like CMS than JNDI ever will be. I will redo my descriptor to jboss-portlet.xml and remove my portlet-instances.xml file. In hindsight - jboss-portlet.xml makes more sense for this dependency injection as it is very unlikely that a dependency for a service would exist for a particular instance of a portlet but not universally for that portlet's class.

The interceptor sounds very cool! I like this aspect based stuff - it saves me from writing the same code in a hundred places to do something like you are describing (which I may actually need for some of the ideas I have for Portal). I guess that's why the smart guys came up with it. :)

Thank you for a very cool set of tech in Portal and Seam - I think it has big potential.

[antoine_h]

Hello,

I am using 2.2 and made a sub class of CMSPortlet.
it is working, the CMS instance is retrieved the same way as in CMSPortlet class.
I had to inject the service in the war, with the
<service-name>CMS</service-name> etc... as said in the jboss-portlet.xml.

By the way, I had to redefine a instance in the sub class (protected CMS MyCMSService;), because the CMS CMSService is private in the CMSPortlet. So overloaded the init method to, with a call to the super method.
not clean, but working.