What is Service Builder?

Generating the Back-end

Step 1 of 3

Now you’ll use Service Builder to generate create, read, update, delete, and find operations for your application. You’ll also use Service Builder to generate the necessary model, persistence, and service layers for your application. Then you can add your application’s necessary business logic.

Guestbook Application Design

In the prototype application, you defined a single guestbook’s entries and displayed them in a list. The full application will handle multiple Guestbooks and their entries. To make this work, you’ll create two tables in the database: one for guestbooks and one for guestbook entries.

Figure 1: When you're done, the Guestbook supports multiple guestbooks and makes use of many Liferay features.

Service Layer

This application is data-driven. It uses services for storing and retrieving data. The application asks for data, and the service fetches it from the persistence layer. The application can then display this data to the user, who reads or modifies it. If the data is modified, the application passes it back to the service, and which calls the persistence layer to store it. The application doesn’t need to know anything about how the service does what it does.

To get started, you’ll create a Service Builder project and populate its service.xml file with all the necessary entities to generate this code:

1. In Liferay Dev Studio DXP, click File → New → Liferay Module Project.

2. Name the project guestbook.

3. Select service-builder for the Project Template Name.

4. Click Next.

5. Enter com.liferay.docs.guestbook for the Package Name.

6. Click Finish.

This creates two modules: an API module (guestbook-api) and a service module (guestbook-service). Next, you’ll learn how to use them.

Figure 2: Your current project structure.