Enabling Code Assist Features in Your Project

Liferay Dev Studio’s integration of Tern provides many valuable front-end and back-end development tools for code inference and completion. This tutorial covers how to enable Tern features for your projects.

Before beginning this tutorial, make sure your Dev Studio instance has the necessary development tooling and Tern integration installed. To do this, go to Help → About Eclipse → Installation Details and search for Liferay IDE AlloyUI under Installed Software. If you have it installed, you can continue to the Setting Up Tern Features section; if you do not, you’ll need to install it by following the instructions below.

Navigate to Help → Install New Software….

Paste the following link into the Work with field:

http://releases.liferay.com/tools/ide/latest/stable/

Make sure the Liferay IDE AlloyUI option is checked and finish the installation process.

Figure 1: The *Liferay IDE AlloyUI* option is actually a sub-option listed within the *Liferay IDE* option.

Now that the necessary features are installed, follow the steps below to learn how to enable Tern’s code assist features in your project.

Setting Up Tern Features

Tern features are enabled on a project-by-project basis. By default, Tern is already enabled for Liferay WAR-style portlets generated using the Plugins SDK. For all other project types, (e.g., Liferay module projects), you’ll need to follow the steps below:

Right-click on your project and select Configure → Convert to Tern Project.

Your project is now configured to use Tern. Now that you have your project configured, you need to enable the modules you want to use for your project.
You’re presented a menu listing Tern plugins that are installed. For example, to use AlloyUI features, you’ll need the AlloyUI, Browser, JSCS, Liferay, and YUI Library modules enabled. The figure below shows the Tern Modules menu.

Figure 2: By selecting these Tern modules, you can use AlloyUI code assist features in your project.

If you need to refer back to this list of installed Tern plugins, right-click your project and select Properties. Then select Tern → Modules.
Check any additional modules you wish to use in your project and click OK.