Liferay offered different ways to extend and customize liferay portal. Liferay have come up with mechanism called plugins to extend and customize liferay portal.
Liferay Plugin environment offers different types of plugins based on their contextual use and what exactly they act upon liferay portal. One of the Plugin type is HOOK.
In general meaning of hook is a piece or item which can give additional capability where we use it and it can easily add or removable item.
Liferay hook plugins are is part of Liferay Plugins SDK so we can use Plugins SDK to develop hook plugins. when we look into parent directory of Plugins SDK you can see hooks directory there all created plugins are resided
Liferay Hook Plugin
Liferay Hook Plugin is used to customize liferay portal. Hooks are hot deployable plugins so when we modify we need not to restart server to apply changes in the portal.
We can modify portal web resources such as JSP , JSPF, CSS, Java Scrip files, Language properties files,some of portal properties,customize actions, modify portal struts actions,portlet struts actions,overriding portal services,create servlet filters and create indexser post processors.
When we create any hook Plugin we need to know one important file called liferay-hook.xml configuration files.
Liferay-hook.xml files consist set of predefined xml tags and there we will defined all configuratiion so that portlet container modify the files according to this file.
Liferay-hook.xml tags and its description are available in liferay-hook_6_x_x.dtd file.
The main parent tags as below
<!ELEMENT hook (portal-properties?, language-properties*, custom-jsp-dir?,
custom-jsp-global?, indexer-post-processor*, service*, servlet-filter*,
servlet-filter-mapping*, struts-action*)>
We have following types of Hooks
JSP Hooks
Application Adopter Hooks
Custom Action Hooks
Portal Properties Hooks
Language Properties Hooks
Struts Action Hooks
Indexer Post Processor Hooks
Portal Service Hooks
Servlet Filter Hooks
JSP Hooks
When ever we want modify the portal jsp pages or existed portlet JSP pages then we will use JSP hooks.
Assume we want add some new fields or write some new text in create account JSP pages then we can do it from JSP hooks.
We can create JSP hooks using Liferay IDE or we can use Command Line Interface to create hooks.
Reference:
Application Adopter Hooks
Application adopter hooks are special types of JSP hooks and we can define scope to the customization.
Generally when we use JSP hooks then changes will be applicable to through out the portal but we need a requirement the changes should be specific to particular site or site template then we will use Application Adopter Hooks.
Application Adapters are used to Customizing Sites and Site Templates and the changes are applicable to site level. They are used for overriding JSPs.
Reference:
Custom Action Hooks
Hooks are useful for triggering custom actions on common portal events, like user login or system startup. The actions for each of these events are defined in portal.properties so we need to extend this file to create a custom action. Hooks make this a simple task.
Reference:
Portal Properties Hooks
Portal properties hook overriding the existing portal properties and Portal properties hook can modify the some of the portal properties not all the portal properties. The modifiable list of properties are specified in liferay-hook_6_x_x.dtd file.
If the properties are not listen in the liferay-hook_6_x_x.dtd file then we cannot modify it from portal properties hooks.Assume we want to modify login.events.pre ,login.events.post properties then we will use Portal Properties Hooks.
Reference:
Language Properties Hooks
Language Properties Hooks are used to overriding the existed portal language properties.
We can aslo add new properties and we can modify existing portal properties lets we want change some properties French language properties i.e. Language_fr.properties then we can create Language Properties Hooks to make the changes.
Reference:
Struts Action Hooks
Struts Action Hooks are used to adding or overriding struts action Java classes. We have portal struts actions and portlet struts actions. Struts Action Hooks can modify the both struts actions.
Reference:
Indexer Post Processor Hooks
Indexer Post Processor Hooks can modify search summaries , indexes and queries in the existed portal.
We can create new Indexer post processor to create new search summaries lets say if want perform search on all fields of User then we can do it by Indexer Post Processor Hooks
Reference:
Portal Service Hooks
portal service hooks are used to modify the existed portal services. When we want overriding the existed portal services then portal service hooks are best choice. Lets say we want to modify the User services then we can use portal service hooks.
Reference:
Servlet Filter Hooks
Servlet filter hook: Servlet filters allow you to pre-process requests going to a servlet and post-process responses coming from a servlet. As server requests are received that match URL patterns or match servlet names specified in your servlet filter mappings, your specified servlet filters are applied. Hook elements servlet-filter and servlet-filter-mapping have been added to liferay-hook.xml so you can configure your servlet filters.
Reference:
Important Points
Liferay Hook plugins are hot deployable so we can easy deploy and undeploy it without restart servers the changes will be applied.
When we want customize liferay portal hooks are best choice and if it not possible form hook then only we should prefer some other choices like ext plugins.
Hooks plugins have xml configuration file liferay-hook.xmland it consist of predefined tags and these tags information available in liferay-hook_6_x_x.dtd there all tags are defined and we should use specified tags.
Liferay hook plugins are is part of Liferay Plugins SDK so we can use Plugins SDK to develop hook plugins.
Author
0 comments:
Post a Comment