Configuring Your Admin App's Actions Menu

In versions prior to Liferay DXP 7.0, it was common to have a series of buttons or menus with actions in the different views of the app. In Liferay DXP 7.0 the proposed pattern is to move all of these actions to the upper right menu of the administrative portlet, leaving the primary action (often an “Add” operation) visible in the add menu, using the Add Button pattern. For example, the web content application has the actions menu shown below:

Figure 1: The upper right ellipsis menu contains most of the actions for the app.

The changes covered in this tutorial do not refer to actions menus associated with entities. For those, see Applying Lexicon Patterns to Your Forms, Navigation, and Search.

This tutorial shows how to configure the actions menu in your admin app. The first step is to create the PortletConfigurationIconFactory class.

Creating the Icon Factory Class

To add an action to the upper right menu of the Admin portlet you must first create a PortletConfigurationIcon Component class. This class specifies the portlet for the action, the screen to show it on, and the order (by specifying a weight).

In this example, the action appears on the System Settings portlet. To make it appear in a secondary screen, you can use the path property as shown below:

@Component(
  immediate = true,
  property = {
     "javax.portlet.name=" +
        ConfigurationAdminPortletKeys.SYSTEM_SETTINGS,
     "path=/view_factory_instances"
  },
  service = PortletConfigurationIconFactory.class
)
public class ExportFactoryInstancesIconFactory
  extends BasePortletConfigurationIconFactory {

  @Override
  public PortletConfigurationIcon create(PortletRequest portletRequest) {
     return new ExportFactoryInstancesIcon(portletRequest);
  }

  @Override
  public double getWeight() {
     return 1;
  }

}

The value of the path property depends on the MVC framework used to develop the app.

For the MVCPortlet framework, provide the path (often a JSP) from the mvcPath parameter.

For MVCPortlet with MVC Commands, the path should contain the mvcRenderCommandName where the actions should be displayed (such as /document_library/edit_folder for example).

Now that your PortletConfigurationIconFactory class is written, you can write the PortletConfigurationIcon class next.

Writing the Configuration Icon Class

The second class that you must write is a class that extends the BasePortletConfigurationIcon class. This class specifies the action’s label, whether it’s invoked with a GET or POST method, and the URL (or onClick JavaScript method) to invoke when the action is clicked. It can also implement some custom code to determine whether the action should display for the current request. For example the class below creates a export-all-settings label and specifies the GET method for the action:

public class ExportAllConfigurationIcon extends BasePortletConfigurationIcon {

  public ExportAllConfigurationIcon(PortletRequest portletRequest) {
     super(portletRequest);
  }

  @Override
  public String getMessage() {
     return "export-all-settings";
  }

  @Override
  public String getMethod() {
     return "GET";
  }

  @Override
  public String getURL() {
     LiferayPortletURL liferayPortletURL =
        (LiferayPortletURL)PortalUtil.getControlPanelPortletURL(
           portletRequest, ConfigurationAdminPortletKeys.SYSTEM_SETTINGS,
           PortletRequest.RESOURCE_PHASE);

     liferayPortletURL.setResourceID("export");

     return liferayPortletURL.toString();
  }

  @Override
  public boolean isShow() {
     return true;
  }

}

By default, if the portlet uses mvcPath, the global actions (such as configuration, export/import, maximized, etc.) are displayed for the JSP indicated in the initialization parameter of the portlet javax.portlet.init-param.view-template=/view.jsp. The value indicates the JSP where the global actions should be displayed.

However, if the portlet uses MVC Command, the views for the global actions must be indicated with the initialization parameter javax.portlet.init-param.mvc-command-names-default-views=/wiki_admin/view and the value must contain the mvcRenderCommandName where the global actions should be displayed.

For portlets that can be added to a page, if the desired behavior is to always include the configuration options, the following initialization parameter should be added to the portlet:

javax.portlet.init-param.always-display-default-configuration-icons=true

Now you know how to configure your admin app’s actions!

Related Topics

Applying Lexicon Patterns to your Forms, Navigation, and Search

Configuring Your Application’s Title and Back Link