Creating the Classes

Writing the Guestbook Admin App

Step 1 of 5

Because the Guestbook and Guestbook Admin applications should be bundled together, you’ll create the new application manually inside the guestbook-web project, rather than by using a wizard. If you disagree with this design decision, you can create a separate project for Guestbook Admin; the project template you’d use is panel-app. For now, however, it’s better to go through the process manually to learn how it all works:

1. Right-click the com.liferay.docs.guestbook.portlet package in the guestbook-web project and select New → Class.

2. Name the class GuestbookAdminPortlet.

3. Click Browse next to the Superclass and search for MVCPortlet. Click it and select OK.

4. Click Finish.

You now have your Guestbook Admin application’s portlet class. For an administrative application, however, you need at least one more component.

Panels and Categories

As described in the product menu tutorial, there are three sections of the product menu as illustrated below.

Figure 1: The product menu is split into three sections: the Control Panel, the User menu, and the Sites menu.

Each section is called a panel category. A panel category can hold various menu items called panel apps. In the illustration above, the Sites menu is open to reveal its panel apps and categories (yes, you can nest them).

The most natural place for the Guestbook Admin portlet is in the Content panel category with Liferay DXP’s other content-based apps. This integrates it nicely in the spot where Site administrators expect it to be. This also means you don’t have to create a new category for it: you can just create the panel entry, which is what you’ll do next. If you’d like to learn more about panel categories and apps after this, see the product menu tutorial and the control menu tutorial.

Follow these steps to create the panel entry for the Guestbook Admin portlet:

1. Add the dependency you need to extend Liferay DXP’s panel categories and apps. To do this, open guestbook-web’s build.gradle file and add this dependency:

   compileOnly group: "com.liferay", name: "com.liferay.application.list.api", version: "2.0.0"
   

2. Right-click guestbook-web and select Gradle → Refresh Gradle Project.

3. Right-click src/main/java in the guestbook-web project and select New → Package. Name the package com.liferay.docs.guestbook.application.list and click Finish.

4. Right-click your new package and select New → Class. Name the class GuestbookAdminPanelApp.

5. Click Browse next to Superclass, search for BasePanelApp, select it, and click OK. Then click Finish.

Great! You’ve created the classes you need, and you’re ready to begin working on them.