Page level communication on JSR286 portlets

[michaelchan]

Hi, I am using the bundled version of JBP 2.7 CR.1. And have been trying out event publishing / processing. However, it seems that one event could not be published from one portal page to another. The following is the code snippet of process action:

 public void processAction(ActionRequest request, ActionResponse response) throws PortletException, IOException {

 QName qName = new QName("test.events", "TestEvent", "test");
 log.info("Qname namespace: " + qName.getNamespaceURI());
 log.info("Qname localpart: " + qName.getLocalPart());
 log.info("The Qname object: " + qName);
 String value1 = (String)request.getParameter("value1");
 String value2 = (String)request.getParameter("value2");
 log.info("v1: " + value1 + " v2: " + value2);

 TestEvent testEvent = new TestEvent();
 testEvent.setTestValue1(value1);
 testEvent.setTestValue2(value2);
 log.info("now publishing events...");
 response.setEvent(qName, testEvent);
 response.sendRedirect("/portal/test/page2");
 }

[prabhat.jha]

Are you doing explicit coordination or implicit? If it's explicit then as mentioned in doc, it only happens in the scope of same page.

[michaelchan]

Thanks for pointing me to the right direction, at least i know where to look for answers now.

[michaelchan]

So if I haven't done any explicit wirings, events and public render params should be able to sent across pages, am I right?

[michaelchan]

But the thing is, I can't seem to get this to work, is my code wrong?

[theute]

JSR-286 events are scoped to a page.

[michaelchan]

Hi Thomas, thanks very much for the reply.

If that's the case, is there anything I can do to achieve cross page communications?

[theute]

What is your usecase ? It's just too easy to abuse JSR-286 events, this is a reason why we took a conservative approach.

(This is not meant to replace JMS for example)

[michaelchan]

for example, I have two portal pages, one for navigation and another one for displaying products. When user click a link on the navigation page, it should redirect user to the product page, and the product page should display the product according to the PID. Is it possible to pass the pid across different portal pages without using session?

[theute]

Then it's more of a public render parameter than an event, you should look at aliases.

I've blogged about it here: http://blog.jboss-portal.org/2008/09/portlet-coordination.html

[johnnythehun]

I could not understand how to define public render parameters.
I looked at the spec, read the blog post and took a look at the reference but it still is foggy.

My Page is called default, my windows are called: TestPortlet and TestPortletLeft

I want to be able to use a global foo parameter, for example in an url like:
http://localhost:8080/portal/portal/default?foo=you

I tried putting the following code into the ...-object.xml between the page /page tags:

<coordination>
 <bindings>
 <implicit-mode>FALSE</implicit-mode>
 <parameter-binding>
 <id>parameterBinding1</id>
 <window-coordination>
 <window-name>TestPortlet</window-name>
 <qname>foo</qname>
 </window-coordination>
 </parameter-binding>
 </bindings>
 </coordination>

But I am still unable to access the foo parameter from my TestPortlet code doView() method.


Could you help me, what am I doing wrong?

Do I always have to explicitly set all parameters that I want to use and access (page-) globally?

[michaelchan]

You defined public renderparam in portlet.xml and not on *-objects.xml

If you want to use a page param, you will first need to define a public render param on every portlet.xml (since we could use one portlet.xml for multiple portlets, it is not required to redefine a public render param if the portlets are using the same portlet.xml) and then you will need to mark the public render param as supported for each portlet.

Once you have done that, you bind the public render param you wish to use on a page level to an alias in *-objects.xml or via the admin portlet.