Displaying Guestbook Entries

Developing Your First Portlet
Step 8 of 8

To display guestbook entries, you must do the reverse of what you did to store them: retrieve them from portlet preferences, loop through them, and present them on the page. The best way to do this with MVC Portlet is to use the Model-View-Controller paradigm. You already have the view (your JSP files) and your controller (your portlet class). Now you need your model.

Creating Your Model

  1. Create a new package called com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model. To do this, right-click your src/main/java folder and select NewPackage. Then enter the package name in the dialog box that appears.

  2. Next, create your model class. This is a simple class that models a guestbook entry. To do this, right-click your new package and select NewClass. Name the class Entry, and click Finish.

    You now have a Java class for your guestbook entries. Next, you’ll give it the fields you need to store entries.

  3. Create two private String variables: name and message.

    private String name;
    private String message;
    
  4. Right-click a blank area of the editor and select SourceGenerate Getters and Setters. Click Select All in the dialog that pops up, and then click OK.

  5. Next, provide two constructors: one that initializes the class with no values for the two fields, and one that takes the two fields as parameters and sets their values:

    public Entry() {
       this.name = null;
       this.message = null;
    }
    
    public Entry(String name, String message) {
       setName(name);
       setMessage(message);
    }
    

Your completed model class looks like this:

package com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model;

public class Entry {

    private String name;
    private String message;

    public Entry() {
        this.name = null;
        this.message = null;
    }

    public Entry(String name, String message) {
        setName(name);
        setMessage(message);
    }

    public String getName() {
        return name;
    }

    public String getMessage() {
        return message;
    }

    public void setName(String name) {
        this.name = name;
    }

    public void setMessage(String message) {
        this.message = message;
    }

}

Now that you have your model, you have an easy way of encapsulating guestbook entries so they can be processed by the controller layer and displayed by the view layer. Your next step is to enhance the controller (your portlet class) so that guestbook entries are processed and ready to display when users see the guestbook application.

Customizing How Your Application is Rendered

As mentioned earlier, your application is using two portlet phases: render and action. To make the guestbook show the saved guestbook entries when users view the application, you need to customize your portlet’s render functionality, which it’s currently inheriting from its parent class, MVCPortlet.

  1. Open GuestbookPortlet and add the following method below your addEntry method:

    @Override
    public void render(RenderRequest renderRequest, RenderResponse renderResponse)
        throws PortletException, IOException {
    
        PortletPreferences prefs = renderRequest.getPreferences();
        String[] guestbookEntries = prefs.getValues("guestbook-entries", new String[1]);
    
        if (guestbookEntries[0] != null) {
            List<Entry> entries = parseEntries(guestbookEntries);
            renderRequest.setAttribute("entries", entries);
        }
    
        super.render(renderRequest, renderResponse);
    }
    

    This method retrieves the guestbook entries from the configuration, converts it to a List of Entry objects, and places that List into the request object. It then calls the parent class’s render method.

  2. Beneath the render method, add the following method that converts the array to a List of your model objects:

    private List<Entry> parseEntries(String[] guestbookEntries) {
        List<Entry> entries = new ArrayList<Entry>();
    
        for (String entry : guestbookEntries) {
            String[] parts = entry.split("\\^", 2);
            Entry gbEntry = new Entry(parts[0], parts[1]);
            entries.add(gbEntry);
        }
    
        return entries;
    }
    
  3. Press [CTRL]+[SHIFT]+O to organize imports.

As you can see, this method splits the entries in the String array into two parts based on the caret (^) character.

Now that you have your controller preparing your data for display, your next step is to implement the view so users can see guestbook entries.

Displaying Guestbook Entries

Liferay’s development framework makes it easy to loop through data and display it nicely to the end user. You’ll use a Liferay UI construct called Search Container to make this happen.

  1. Add these tags to your view.jsp in between the </portlet:renderURL> and <aui:button-row> tags:

    <jsp:useBean id="entries" class="java.util.ArrayList" scope="request"/>
    
    <liferay-ui:search-container>
        <liferay-ui:search-container-results results="<%= entries %>" />
    
        <liferay-ui:search-container-row
            className="com.liferay.docs.guestbook.model.Entry"
            modelVar="entry"
        >
            <liferay-ui:search-container-column-text property="message" />
    
            <liferay-ui:search-container-column-text property="name" />
        </liferay-ui:search-container-row>
    
        <liferay-ui:search-iterator />
    </liferay-ui:search-container>
    

Save your work, deploy your application, and try adding some guestbook entries.

Awesome! You’ve finished your working prototype! You have a working application that adds and saves guestbook entries.

The way you’re saving the entries isn’t the best way to persist data in your application. Next, you’ll use Service Builder to generate your persistence classes and the methods you need to store your application data in the database.

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