Liferay Sync, released in September 2012, is an add-on product for Liferay 6.1 GA2 CE and EE that synchronizes files between your Liferay server and users’ desktop and mobile environments. With Liferay Sync, your users can publish and access shared documents and files from their native environments without using a browser. Windows and Mac OS desktops and Android and iOS-based mobile platforms are currently supported. As users add and collaborate on documents and files, Liferay Sync automatically synchronizes them across all configured Sync clients. Liferay Sync is fully integrated into the Liferay Platform so that features such as authentication, versioning, and social collaboration function in the supported environments. Liferay Sync stores files locally so that they’re always available, even when you’re offline. It automatically synchronizes your files upon reconnection.
How Does it Work?
Liferay Sync manages documents and site information through Liferay 6.1’s built-in web services. Clients securely communicate to Liferay using user-supplied credentials such that each user can only access those documents and sites for which they have permission. Changes made through Liferay Sync are immediately available to the rest of the Liferay Platform, including users accessing Liferay through traditional web-based interfaces.
For desktop environments, a new folder structure is created and used for synchronizing files. Files found therein can be treated as any ordinary file. Credentials, sync frequency, and other options can be configured in-client. Native desktop notification events keep you abreast of what Sync is doing, and native menu and taskbar integration keep Sync controls within easy reach.
Mobile environments are naturally dependent on the way in which documents are handled. For Android and iOS, documents are maintained in a file list, and can be viewed by clicking on the files themselves. External files accessible from other apps can be “opened” using Liferay Sync, thereby dropping them into your Sync folder and synchronizing them across other Sync clients. In iOS devices, “pulling down” on the Sync file list forces a refresh. In Android, click on the Refresh icon within the menu.
Liferay Sync is designed to work with both Liferay 6.1 GA2 CE and EE. Using Sync with Liferay CE limits users to syncing one site. Using Sync with Liferay EE enables users to synchronize documents and files across all the sites which they can access.
Liferay Sync is also designed to work with Liferay Social Office. You can sync one site from Social Office CE as well as one site from Liferay Portal CE. If you’ve installed Social Office CE on Liferay Portal EE, then you can sync any site from Portal, but only one from Social Office. If you’ve installed Social Office EE on Liferay Portal EE, then you can sync any and all sites.
Installing Liferay Sync
For Windows or Mac OS, visit the Liferay Sync product page Liferay Sync Product
Page, and click Get it
Now (on the right-side navigation menu) to download the client application for
your desktop environment. For Windows, the client application installer should
be named liferay-sync-<version>-<date>.exe. For Mac OS, it should be
liferay-sync-<version>-<date>.dmg. There’s also a Linux beta version
available. Follow the on-screen instructions of the installer wizard to
configure your client to connect to an existing Liferay 6.1 deployment using
your Liferay credentials.
Windows
Upon launching the Windows application installer, you’ll be prompted to choose an installation location for Liferay Sync. Browse to an appropriate location on your machine and click Next.
Figure 4.19: Use the Liferay Sync Installation wizard to choose an installation location.
Leave the Run Liferay Sync button checked to automatically start Liferay Sync after you click Finish.
Figure 4.20: You'll see the following screen once Liferay Sync has been installed. Click *Finish* to exit the installation wizard.
The first time you run Liferay Sync, you’ll have to enter some account information. Sync needs to know where you’d like to locally store the files it’s supposed to sync with your Liferay server. And, of course, it needs to know your server’s URL and the account credentials with which it should authenticate.
Figure 4.21: The first time you run Liferay Sync, you'll have to tell it how to communicate with your Liferay server.
The options for the Mac OS application installer are similar.
Mac OS
Liferay Sync for Mac is packaged in a DMG file. Double-clicking on a DMG mounts it as a disk image, and opens a window showing the contents of the image. To install Sync, drag the Liferay Sync icon to the Applications folder. Once it’s installed, go to your Applications folder to run it.
Figure 4.22: Drag the Liferay Sync icon to the Applications folder.
When you launch Liferay Sync, the first thing you need to do is provide it with the URL for the Liferay server that you’ll be using Sync with, along with your Liferay credentials. After that, you’ll need to run through the brief setup process that was described above for Windows.
Figure 4.23: You can provide the same information requested by the Windows application installer.
Once you’ve finished your configuration and have clicked OK, Liferay Sync starts running in the background, and an icon appears in your top menu bar. If you wish to change any of your settings, click the icon to open the Liferay Sync menu and click on Preferences. Note that on Windows, the Sync menu says Properties, not Preferences.
Mobile
For iOS, visit the App Store, search for Liferay, and install the Liferay Sync App.
For Android, go to Google Play, search for Liferay, and install the Liferay Sync App.
Once the mobile apps are installed, follow the on-screen instructions as below.
Using Liferay Sync on the Desktop
Once installed, you’ll see a Liferay Sync icon in your taskbar whenever it’s running. A green checkmark means Liferay Sync has a working connection to your Liferay server and is updating the files in your Sync folder according to the interval you specified in the wizard. Click the Liferay Sync icon in your taskbar to bring up the menu.
Figure 4.24: Open the Liferay Sync taskbar menu to access the following options.
Open Sync Folder opens your Liferay Sync folder in your native file manager.
Open Website provides links to the pages containing the Documents and Media portlets which you have permission to access. By default, you can find links to your personal Documents and Media repository as well as links to the Documents and Media repositories of all the other sites you belong to.
Recent Files shows a list of recently created or modified files from all the repositories you can access.
Properties (Preferences, on Mac OS) lets you change properties like starting on login, desktop notifications, and sync frequency. It also allows you to edit the account information you provided when you started Sync for the first time. For example, you can enter a new URL for your Liferay server and enter a different set of Liferay credentials.
Figure 4.25: Open the Liferay Sync menu and select *Properties* (*Preferences*, on Mac OS) to edit the settings you configured during setup.
There are three items listed in the General Settings section. Start Liferay Sync on Login is checked by default. If you don’t want Sync to start automatically, uncheck this. Show Desktop Notifications is also checked by default. Unless you uncheck this, when a file that you have synced is changed, a small notification will appear in the corner of your screen. The Check Server For Updates Every: field enables you to set how frequently it will check to see if anything has changed. This can be set anywhere between 5 seconds and 30 minutes.
Click the Edit Settings button in the Account Settings section to specify your server’s URL and enter your Liferay credentials. Use the Test Connection button to make sure Liferay Sync can communicate with the server. Editing your settings also allows you to specify your Sync folder, the folder where Sync will store files on your machine. By default, files are stored in the liferay-sync subfolder of your personal Documents folder.
Finally, the Site Settings section allows you to choose which sites you wish to sync media from. By default, it will list all of the sites that you are a member of, but you can uncheck any of those sites if you don’t want to sync those files.
Sync Now instructs Liferay Sync to check the Liferay server for updates immediately.
Pause Syncing instructs Liferay Sync to suspend syncing until further notice. If someone added a very large file to one of your shared folders that’s taking a very long time to sync, you might want to use this option and resume syncing at a later time.
About displays Liferay Sync version information, copyright information, and a link to Liferay’s home page.
Check for Updates checks to see if a new version of Liferay Sync is available from liferay.com and allows you to set whether or not Liferay Sync should automatically check for updates.
Using Your Sync Folder
Once Liferay Sync has been configured and is running, any files you add to or modify in your Sync folder are automatically detected and uploaded to your Liferay server. Also, changes from other users are downloaded to your Sync folder.
If you delete a file your sync folder, it will only be deleted locally. It will not be deleted on the server. This mechanism prevents users from accidentally deleting shared files. When you delete a file from you Sync folder, Sync will no longer download changes to this file the next time it syncs. If you want to go back to syncing a file, simply restore it from you recycle bin or trash can. Once the file is restored back to the Sync folder, Sync keeps that file in sync by uploading any of your changes and downloading any changes from the server.
You can run through the following exercise to familiarize yourself with how to
create, edit, download, and upload files with Liferay Sync. First, open your
Liferay Sync folder in your file manager (use the Open Sync Folder option of
the Liferay Sync menu from the taskbar), and create a new file called
README.txt. Edit this file and enter the word test. Next, check that you can
access this file from your Liferay site. Open your browser, navigate to your
Liferay site, and sign in with your Liferay account credentials. First, make
sure that that you’re on the site you want to sync with. Then navigate to Site
Administration → Documents and Media. You should see your README.txt
file listed there.
Figure 4.26: You can access the same files from Liferay Sync that you can from Liferay's web interface.
Download the file (click the small triangle icon at the top right corner of the
README.txt icon and select Download) to a convenient location on your
machine and check that it still says test. Now open the README.txt file in
your Sync folder and edit it so that it says second test. Choose Sync now
and then go back to your browser and refresh your Documents and Media page.
Click on the README.txt icon, look at the information displayed to the right,
and you’ll see that its version number has incremented.
Figure 4.27: Updating a file through Liferay Sync increments the file's version number. You can view a file's version number through the web interface.
Click Sync Now from the menu to force sync to download any remote changes. You’ll see that it now says second test–your edit was uploaded to the server. You can be confident that this edit was also downloaded by all other Liferay Sync clients connected to your site.
Demonstrating Liferay Sync Permissions
Liferay Sync uses the default Liferay permissions to determine which files and folders are synced to the user’s machine. This means that whatever files a user can access from a certain site are the ones that will be pulled down by Liferay Sync if that site is selected in the Sync client. You can test the functionality of Liferay Sync permissions by performing the following steps. First, create a new file on your desktop called secret.txt. Enter the text classified information into this file. Then use your browser to log into Liferay and create a new user called secretagent with the email address secretagent@liferay.com and the password test. Also, create a new private site called Secret Site. Then assign the secretagent user to the Secret Site and grant the Site Administrator role to this user. There will be no other members of this site unless they are assigned by an administrator. Log in as the secretagent and use Go to → Control Panel, select Secret Site in the context menu selector, and click on Documents and Media. Then upload the secret.txt document.
Next, we’ll configure our Liferay Sync client to log in with the secretagent user’s credentials and access the Secret Site. Open the Liferay Sync menu from the taskbar and select Properties. Click on the Edit Settings button, choose a new Sync folder, enter your server’s URL, and enter the secret agent’s credentials: secretagent@liferay.com and test. Lastly, uncheck all Liferay sites except the Secret Site, and click OK. Confirm that the secret.txt file that you uploaded to the Secret Site, is downloaded to your new Sync folder. Open it and check that it says classified information. If you reconfigure your Sync client connect to your Liferay instance using the credentials of another user who doesn’t belong to the Secret Site, the secret.txt will not be downloaded. Congratulations! You’ve successfully set up a Liferay Sync folder that can only be accessed by the secretagent user and your administrators.
Using Liferay Sync Mobile
Once you’ve installed Liferay Sync on your Android or iOS mobile environment, you’ll be able to access the same functionality that’s available when using Sync on a desktop environment. However, the interface differs from that of the Sync desktop clients.
Android
After installing Liferay Sync for Android, an empty screen appears asking you to set up the app. This screen appears whenever preferences are missing.
Figure 4.28: First screen
Touch the screen and it displays the Settings view. You can always go back to Settings by clicking on the wrench icon at the top right corner of the screen.
Figure 4.29: Android settings
Enter your Liferay server credentials by filling in your Login, Password, and Server information. Your Login is either your user account’s email address or screen name. Use the same credentials you use to log in to the portal in a browser. In the Server field, enter your portal’s URL. In this example, the server URL is http://www.liferay.com. Click the key icon on the top right to test your connection and check if everything is correct.
Note for Gingerbread users: If you can’t see some of the features described here, click on the menu button to view a list of all possible actions. This includes options to refresh, open the settings menu, upload files, take photos, test your connection, etc.
Figure 4.30: Gingerbread
After you have successfully tested your connection, hit the back button and you’ll see a list of Liferay sites you have access to.
Figure 4.31: Sites
You can browse the files of a site by tapping on any of them. This opens a list of the folders and files belonging to the site that you have permission to view.
Figure 4.32: Folder and files
From here, you can click on a folder and browse deeper into the folder hierarchy or click the Back button to navigate back to parent folders up to the initial Sites list.
Single-tap on a file to open it. If the file has never been downloaded before, Sync will download it and open after it has finished downloading. You can only view the file’s contents if your device has an app installed that can open the file type. For example, in order to open a PDF, you must have at least one PDF viewer app installed. Otherwise, you will see a message informing you that no viewer is available and you need to install an app that can open the file.
Long-press on any folder or file to find a list of actions you can take on it: Add to Favorites, View Details, Download, Rename or Delete. This actions menu varies depending on which entry type is selected: file or folder.
On Gingerbread, the actions menu looks like this:
Figure 4.33: Gingerbread menu
On Ice Cream Sandwich and above, you can find the action icons and menu at the top right:
Figure 4.34: ICS menu
Clicking on Add to Favorites (Gingerbread) or the gray star (Ice Cream Sandwich) adds the selected file to the Favorites list. Favorites are special files that can be accessed and viewed even when you are offline (more details below). If a file is already marked as a favorite, you’ll see a Remove from Favorites or blue star instead. Clicking on it removes the selected file from the Favorites list.
Clicking on View Details (Gingerbread) or the round icon with the letter “i” (Ice Cream Sandwich) opens the details view, which displays the entry’s metadata such as creation date, author, version, description, etc.:
Figure 4.35: View details
If you click on Download (floppy disk icon on Ice Cream Sandwich), it downloads and overwrites the local file copy.
You can rename a folder or file by clicking on the Rename option. This renames the entry in the portal.
Clicking on Delete deletes the file/folder from the remote portal, and other users won’t be able to view or download it. On Ice Cream Sandwich and above, you can select multiple entries for deletion:
Figure 4.36: Actions
Some actions are not related to a specific folder or file. You can find these actions in the menu on the top action bar when no entry is selected (Gingerbread users need to click on the device menu button). Depending on the device screen width, some icons may overflow to the three dots button on the right. Click on this button to see all of the available actions.
Figure 4.37: More options
The Refresh button fetches and updates the list of folders and files that have been changed in the portal.
The Camera button allows you to quickly take a picture and upload the image to the current folder. The image file name is automatically generated with a time stamp.
The New Folder button asks you for the name of the folder you want to create in the portal.
The Upload button displays the types of local files you can upload to the portal. Choosing Image, for example, shows all images that are stored locally on your device. Once you choose the files and confirm, these files are uploaded to the portal and are placed in the current folder. By default, you can upload images, videos, and audio files. If you have installed an app on your device that can open and browse any type of file, you will also see an option called Other files.
Figure 4.38: Upload local files
The Favorites menu option opens the favorites list. All files that have been marked as favorites show up in this list. You should mark your most important files as favorites because, as mentioned earlier, the Favorites feature gives you quick offline access to them. You can view the contents of items in the Favorites list, view their metadata and, of course, remove them from the list.
Figure 4.39: Favorites
Next, let’s look at the iOS Sync app.
iOS
After installing Liferay Sync for iOS, an empty screen appears asking you to set up the app. This screen appears whenever preferences are missing.
Figure 4.40: iOS Settings
Click on Settings in the toolbar and enter your Liferay server credentials by filling in your Login, Password, and Server information. Your Login is either your user account’s email address or screen name, whichever you use to log in to the portal in a browser. In the Server field, enter your portal’s URL. In this example, the server URL is http://www.liferay.com. Click on Test Connection to check if your configuration is correct.
Figure 4.41: iOS Settings
After you have successfully tested your connection, tap on the Documents toolbar section and you’ll see a list of Liferay sites you have access to.
Figure 4.42: Sites
You can browse the files of a site by tapping on its name or icon. This opens a list of the folders and files belonging to the site that you have permission to view.
Figure 4.43: Folder and files
From here, you can click on a folder to browse deeper into the folder hierarchy. You can also click on the Back button to navigate back to parent folders up to the initial Sites list.
You can refresh the list by pushing it down. This updates all the files and folders that have been changed in the portal.
Figure 4.44: Refreshing
When you click on a file, this file is downloaded from the remote portal and, if a previewer for this file type is available, you can view the contents of the file. The next time you open a file, it won’t download it again; instead, it opens the local copy.
Figure 4.45: Opening a file
There are 3 icons at the bottom of the screen when you open a file:
Clicking on the leftmost round icon with the letter “i” opens the details view, which displays the entry’s metadata such as creation date, author, version, description, etc.:
Figure 4.46: View details
Clicking on the star icon at the center adds the selected file to the Favorites list. Favorites are special files that can be accessed and viewed even when you are offline (more details below). If a file has already been marked as a favorite, clicking on the star icon removes the file from the Favorites list.
Clicking on the rightmost icon displays sharing options. You can, for example, send the file as an email attachment, print the file, or copy it to your clipboard. Some external apps may also appear in this list. For example, you can share your file with social apps and messengers if they are available.
Figure 4.47: Share options
In the file list, there’s an Edit button. Clicking on it switches the app to the edit mode as shown below:
Figure 4.48: Edit mode
Selecting one or more files or folders and clicking on the Delete button deletes the selected files or folders from the remote portal. Once you delete files or folders from the remote portal, other users won’t be able to view or download them.
Selecting only one file or folder enables the Rename button. Click on it to change the entry’s name locally and remotely.
To quickly delete a file or folder from the portal, you can also swipe right and click on the Delete button in the file list view:
Figure 4.49: Deleting a file
If you want to upload an image or video to the portal, click the Plus button at the top right corner. You should see three options:
Take a photo or video opens your camera app and lets you take a photo or record a video and upload it.
Choose Existing allows you to upload multiple photos or videos stored on your device.
Create New Folder lets you type the name of the folder and creates it in the portal.
Figure 4.50: Upload photos and videos
The Favorites toolbar section opens the favorites list. All files that have been marked as favorites show up in this list. You should mark your most important files as favorites because, as mentioned earlier, the Favorites feature gives you quick offline access to them. You can view the contents of items in the Favorites list, view their metadata and, of course, remove them from the list.
Figure 4.51: Favorites
All downloaded files are stored on your device indefinitely.
Figure 4.52: Deleting local copies
If you want to delete downloaded files locally but don’t want to remove them from the portal, go to Settings and click on the Clear Cache button.