Blogs

Introduction So recently I completed a database upgrade from Liferay EE 6.1 up to Liferay DXP 7.4. It was actually pretty straightforward and I didn't encounter any significant blockers. I did however learn some stuff along the way and I thought I'd share those details here so you will be able to do your next Liferay DB upgrade in the same way. Note that although I'm specifically including...

Introduction So I wrote https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/extending-liferay-osgi-modules five years ago targeting Liferay 7.0. A lot has changed since then. Liferay Gradle Workspace plugin has seen numerous updates. Gradle has seen an update or two as well. Recently when asked to assist a client who wanted to extend Liferay's Journal Article service, I started by recommending they look...

Introduction In a recent blog I explained how to create a React-based portlet within your Liferay Gradle Workspace by using the js-widget Blade template which in turn uses the Yeoman Liferay JS Generator to create the project. (Wow, that was a mouthful ;-) ) In this way, you can have your Liferay Gradle Workspace take care of building your complete suite of Liferay modules, the...

Introduction So when you start building your own fragments and using them on your content pages, you will often times run into an issue with propagation... So I like to create fragments for headers and footers and then use those fragments on every page that I build. But when I update those fragments, I have to go into the usages panel to do the propagation so they all get updated. If you...

Introduction I posted two blog posts this week, and each of them had a particular drawback - lack of cluster coordination. The first blog post on cluster-enabled upgrade processes introduced using an @Reference dependency upon a specific Release version, the idea being that the component shouldn't start unless that version was available. When the upgrade process would run on the cluster...

Just a quick one... I've just updated my Log Persister project for Liferay 7.3. You can find it under the 7.3 branch: https://github.com/dnebing/log-persist/tree/7.3 For those that aren't aware, I introduced the Log Persister here: https://liferay.dev/blogs/-/blogs/liferay-7-dxp-making-logging-changes-persistent Normally Liferay does not persist logging. If you make any changes in...

With this first blog, I'd like to start a series about application integration. Quite often, I encounter projects where Liferay must integrate with some backend services. There are lots of integration patterns. Integration may happen at browser or server side. There are many development frameworks available (React, Vue, MVC Portlet, Liferay Faces, Spring MVC Portlet...) Communication with...

I recently was helping a client with an upgrade process and that had run into a little problem... A few of the model hints were not updated on some of the columns in their Service Builder services and, as we all know, Service Builder will not ensure the columns are changed in a production environment (well, actually any environment where the schema.module.build.auto.upgrade property is not set...

A really quick post to share something important with you React + Clay developers out there... A recent update to Clay had a breaking internal change. If after deploying your React portlet and you try to place it on the page and you get errors in the JS console like: liferay-amd-loader | Errors returned from server for require( ["my-module@1.0.0"] ): "Missing dependency...

Introduction A client asked me to build a React portlet for them and I was like, "Oh Yeah!" I mean, it's been a while since I built a React portlet and tooling has really changed a lot since then, so I was really looking forward to this new task. So without further ado, I'm just going to dive right in... Creating the Module Okay, so this is still Liferay and still OSGi, so we're going to be...

When we think about having different authentication types we commonly think about one fluid and intuitive screen to guide the user through this process. And why is that? It’s probably because logging in is a mean to an end, as a user is often trying to pass this step to achieve a broader goal. With this in mind, it is very important to make logging in smoothly and easily.A logging in process...

IntroductionAs many folks know, I'm known for telling people not to look inside the Liferay database itself. It's not always clear what is what in the DB and Liferay has a lot of code around retrieving and updating data that you likely will not get completely right if you were to update the DB directly.I typically end with "Always, always use the Liferay API for your data needs..."And, if...

So some time ago I wrote the Cluster Details marketplace plugin. Basically you drop this guy into all of your Liferay clusters and you get a nifty little control panel that tells you details about the cluster, all of the nodes which have joined the cluster and it identifies who the leader of the cluster is at the moment:Not super complicated, but it is a handy little tool to identify details...

IntroductionHistorically developers have always wanted to be able to control site creation.It's not that Liferay admins are untrusted or anything like that. It is really more the case where setting up a new site can get complicated and the steps to create the site could be quite long. A site may have initial documents, web contents (with structures and templates), pages to create and populate...

IntroductionLiferay has, for a long time, supported RBAC, the role-based access control. It is, of course, backed by the database so (inheritance aside for the moment) a user will be assigned a list of roles that is mostly fixed or unchanging. To change these role assignments, typically an admin is going to log into Liferay and, using the control panel, add or remove roles as necessary.This...

Introduction One of the great advantages I have being known in the community is really the opportunity to meet, talk and work with talented developers and teams. Recently the team at ACSoftware announced in the Liferay Community Slack they were working on a new Liferay development tool, and I was fortunate enough to work with them on evaluation and testing. As it is just released, I...

Introduction So recently a couple of times I've seen folks ask how to send form data somewhere. Some want to trigger remote web service calls, some want to store the data in a different entity or database, etc. The common answer I give is to use a Tee storage type to persist in Liferay while using as you need, and this is sometimes followed by "um, what was that?" ;-) So I figured it was...

In Liferay 6.x, scheduled tasks were kind of easy to implement. I mean, you'd implement a class that implements the Liferay Message Bus's MessageListener interface and then add the details in the <scheduler-entry /> sections in your liferay-portlet.xml file and you'd be off to the races. Well, things are not so simple with Liferay 7 CE / Liferay DXP. In fact, I...