Configuring service.properties

Service Builder generates a service.properties file in your project’s docroot/WEB-INF/src folder. Liferay Portal uses the properties in this file to alter your service’s database schema and load Spring configuration files to support deployment of your service. You should not modify this file, but rather make any necessary overrides in a service-ext.properties file in that same folder.

Here are some of the properties included in the service.properties file:

• build.auto.upgrade: This is true by default. This property determines whether or not Liferay should automatically apply changes to the database model when a new version of the plugin is deployed.
• build.namespace: This is the namespace you defined in docroot/WEB-INF/service.xml. Liferay distinguishes different plugins from each other using their namespaces.
• build.number: Liferay distinguishes different builds of your plugin. Each time a distinct build of your plugin is deployed to Liferay, Liferay increments this number.
• build.date: This is the time of the latest build of your plugin.
• spring.configs: This is a comma-delimited list of Spring configurations.
• include-and-override: The default value of this property defines service-ext.properties as an override file for service.properties.

It’s sometimes useful to override the build.auto.upgrade property from service.properties. Setting build.auto.upgrade=false in your service-ext.properties file prevents Liferay from trying automatically to apply any changes to the database model when a new version of the plugin is deployed. This is needed in projects in which it is preferred to manually manage the changes to the database or in which the SQL schema has intentionally been modified manually after generation by Service Builder.