Before creating your Screenlet, you must determine what it needs to do and how you want developers to use it. This determines where you’ll create your Screenlet and its functionality.
Where you should create your Screenlet depends on how you plan to use it. If you want to reuse or redistribute it, you should create it in an empty Cocoa Touch Framework project in Xcode. You can then use CocoaPods to publish it. The tutorial Packaging iOS Themes explains how to publish an iOS Screenlet. Even though that tutorial refers to Themes, the steps for preparing Screenlets for publication are the same. If you don’t plan to reuse or redistribute your Screenlet, create it in your app’s Xcode project.
You must also determine your Screenlet’s functionality and what data your
Screenlet requires. This determines the actions your Screenlet must support and
the Liferay remote services it must call. For example, Add Bookmark Screenlet
only needs to respond to one action: adding a bookmark to Liferay’s Bookmarks
portlet. To add a bookmark, this Screenlet must call the Liferay instance’s
add-entry service for BookmarksEntry. If you’re running a Liferay instance
locally on port 8080,
click here
to see this service. To add a bookmark, this service requires the following
parameters:
-
groupId: The site ID in the Liferay instance that contains the Bookmarks portlet. -
folderId: The folder ID in the Bookmarks portlet that receives the new bookmark. -
name: The new bookmark’s title. -
url: The new bookmark’s URL. -
description: The new bookmark’s description. -
serviceContext: A LiferayServiceContextobject.
Add Bookmark Screenlet must therefore account for each of these parameters. When
saving a bookmark, the Screenlet asks the user to enter the bookmark’s URL and
name. The user isn’t required, however, to enter any other parameters. This is
because the app developer sets the groupId and folderId via the app’s code.
Also, the Screenlet’s code automatically populates the description and
serviceContext.