MVC Portlet Template

In this article, you’ll learn how to create a Liferay MVC portlet application as a Liferay module. To create a Liferay MVC portlet application via the command line using Blade CLI or Maven, use one of the commands with the following parameters:

blade create -t mvc-portlet [-p packageName] [-c className] projectName

or

mvn archetype:generate \
    -DarchetypeGroupId=com.liferay \
    -DarchetypeArtifactId=com.liferay.project.templates.mvc.portlet \
    -DartifactId=[projectName] \
    -Dpackage=[packageName] \
    -DclassName=[className] \
    -DliferayVersion=7.2

You can also insert the -b maven parameter in the Blade command to generate a Maven project using Blade CLI.

The template for this kind of project is mvc-portlet. Suppose you want to create an MVC portlet project called my-mvc-portlet-project with a package name of com.liferay.docs.mvcportlet and a class name of MyMvcPortlet. Also, you’d like to create a service of type javax.portlet.Portlet that extends the com.liferay.portal.kernel.portlet.bridges.mvc.MVCPortlet class. Here, service means an OSGi service, not a Liferay API. Another way to say service type is to say component type. You could run the following command to accomplish this:

blade create -t mvc-portlet -p com.liferay.docs.mvcportlet -c MyMvcPortlet my-mvc-portlet-project

or

mvn archetype:generate \
    -DarchetypeGroupId=com.liferay \
    -DarchetypeArtifactId=com.liferay.project.templates.mvc.portlet \
    -DgroupId=com.liferay \
    -DartifactId=my-mvc-portlet-project \
    -Dpackage=com.liferay.docs.mvcportlet \
    -Dversion=1.0 \
    -DclassName=MyMvcPortlet \
    -Dauthor=Joe Bloggs \
    -DliferayVersion=7.2

After running the Blade command above, your project’s directory structure looks like this:

• my-mvc-portlet-project
  • gradle
    • wrapper
      • gradle-wrapper.jar
      • gradle-wrapper.properties
  • src
    • main
      • java
        • com/liferay/docs/mvcportlet
          • constants
            • MyMvcPortletKeys.java
          • portlet
            • MyMvcPortlet.java
      • resources
        • content
          • Language.properties
        • META-INF
          • resources
            • init.jsp
            • view.jsp
  • bnd.bnd
  • build.gradle
  • gradlew

The Maven-generated project includes a pom.xml file and does not include the Gradle-specific files, but otherwise, appears exactly the same.

The generated module is a working application and is deployable to a Liferay DXP instance. To build upon the generated app, modify the project by adding logic and additional files to the folders outlined above.