Many applications must be configurable, whether by end users or administrators. A viable configuration solution must support use cases ranging from setting a location for a weather display to more complex cases like settings for a mail or time sheet application.
The Portlet standard’s portlet preferences API can be used for portlet configuration, but it’s intended for storing user preferences. This limits its usefulness for enabling administrator configuration; plus it can only be used with portlets. Instead, application developers tend to create ad hoc configuration methods. But this isn’t necessary.
There’s a full-featured configuration API that’s easy to use, and it’s not limited to portlets. Any class can use the configuration API to set configuration values in the UI. It’s used throughout Liferay DXP’s applications. We like it, and we think you’ll like it too.
The following tutorials show you how to use it.