Liferay’s asset framework is a system that allows you to add core Liferay features to your application. For example, if you’ve built an event management application that displays a list of upcoming events, you can use the asset framework to let users add tags, categories, or comments to make entries more self-descriptive.
Tags, categories, and comments are just a few of the features in Liferay’s asset framework. You’ll also find it easy to use: you’ll be infusing your application with these features in no time.
As background, the term asset refers to any type of content in the portal. This could be text, a file, a URL, an image, documents, blog entries, bookmarks, wiki pages, or anything you create in your applications.
The asset framework tutorials assume that you’ve used Liferay’s Service Builder to generate your persistence layer, that you’ve implemented permissions on the entities that you’re persisting, and that you’ve enabled them for search and indexing. You can learn more about Liferay’s Service Builder and how to use it in the Service Builder tutorial section.
If you’ve yet to do any of those things, you can see how each is done in respective tutorials Generating the Back-end, Using Resources and Permissions, and Leveraging Search. Lastly, the Learning Path Assets: Integrating with Liferay’s Framework takes you through the fundamentals of enabling an example application’s custom entities to use the asset framework. If you haven’t traveled through that Learning Path, we recommend you do so before continuing with the tutorials in this section.
The tutorials that follow in this section explore the details of leveraging the asset framework’s various features. Here are some features that you’ll give your users as you implement them in your app:
- Extensively render your assets.
- Associate tags to custom content types. Users can create and assign new tags or use existing tags.
- Associate categories to custom content types.
- Manage tags from the Control Panel. Administrators can even merge tags.
- Manage categories from the Control Panel. This includes the ability to create category hierarchies.
- Relate assets to one another.
At this point, you might be saying, “Liferay’s asset framework sounds great, but how do I leverage all of its awesome features?” Excellent question, and perfect timing!
Before diving head first into the tutorials, you must implement a way to let the framework know whenever any of your custom content entries is added, updated, or deleted. The next tutorial covers that. From that point onward, each tutorial shows you how to leverage a particular asset framework feature in your UI. It’s time to start your asset framework training!