Liferay Portal DB setup core

Table of Contents

• Liferay Portal version compatibility
• Usage
  • Example project
  • How to bundle and execute DB changes for Liferay portal
  • Configuration header
  • Features
  • Liferay Portal requirements
• Roadmap
• Motivation
• Contributing
• Changelog
  • Version 7.4.3860
  • Version 7.3.605
  • Version 7.3.604
  • Version 7.3.603
  • Version 7.3.602
  • Version 7.3.601
  • Version 7.3.6.0
  • Version 7.3.5.0
  • Version 2.2.0-SNAPSHOT
  • Version 2.1.4

Library that allows to automate Liferay data setup. It uses XML configuration input to add the data.

Liferay Portal version compatibility

Liferay Portal version	DB setup core version
7.4.3.86	7.4.3860 source
7.3.6	7.3.605 jar source
7.3.5	7.3.5 source
7.1.2	source
6.2.5	source

Usage

1. Install the com.ableneo.liferay.db.setup.core-7.4.3860.jar bundle in ${liferay.home}/osgi/modules

2. Prepare your own bundle that uses the library as a provided/compileOnly dependency. For example:

   build.gradle

   dependencies {
       compileOnly 'com.ableneo.liferay:com.ableneo.liferay.db.setup.core:7.4.3860'
   }

   pom.xml

   <dependency>
       <groupId>com.ableneo.liferay</groupId>
       <artifactId>com.ableneo.liferay.db.setup.core</artifactId>
       <version>7.4.3860</version>
       <scope>provided</scope>
   </dependency>

3. Prepare xml data configuration. Documentation sits directly in the setup_definition.xsd file.

   Example documentation

   

   Example configuration: setup.xml

   <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>
   <setup xmlns="http://www.ableneo.com/liferay/setup">
       <configuration>
           <!-- uses random administrator account for the setup in the company, run-as-user-email tag allows to specify particular admin account to be used for the setup -->
           <company>
               <companyid>20101</companyid> <!-- companywebid can be used alternatively -->
           </company>
       </configuration>
       <sites>
           <site> <!-- Guest by default -->
               <vocabulary name="Some categories" uuid="602f55b6-6021-455e-8d6d-696cc25daa91">
                   <title-translation locale="de_DE" text="Einige Kategorien"/>
                   <category name="Other categories" uuid="867b33df-2465-4a81-9945-88159c604589">
                       <title-translation locale="de_DE" text="Andere Kategorien"/>
                       <category name="New category" uuid="5fb4308e-bd21-4cf4-bdc5-3557508ffe4a">
                           <title-translation locale="de_DE" text="Neue Kategorie"/>
                       </category>
                   </category>
               </vocabulary>
           </site>
       </sites>
   </setup>

4. Load the XML setup file and run setup method on it:

   URL resource = Thread.currentThread().getContextClassLoader().getResource(path);
   InputStream setupFile = Objects.requireNonNull(resource, "XML Liferay DB setup file not found in classpath.").openStream();
   Setup setup = MarshallUtil.unmarshall(setupFile);
   boolean setupSuccess = LiferaySetup.setup(setup);

Example project

Used primarily for integration testing but may be a good start for your application: com.ableneo.liferay.portal.setup.example

How to bundle and execute DB changes for Liferay portal

Bundling XML descriptors and code that will execute them in bundle separate to the

Usage in activator class

Configuration header

All data definitions in the setup XML file are applied according to the configuration header. The header defines:

1. the virtual instance on which the library will modify the data.

2. admin user account to be used for data modification

Automatically selected admin user

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<setup xmlns="http://www.ableneo.com/liferay/setup">
  <configuration>
    <!-- run as automatically selected admin -->

    <company>
        <companywebid>liferay.com</companywebid>
    </company>
  </configuration>
</setup>

Specified admin user

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<setup xmlns="http://www.ableneo.com/liferay/setup">
  <configuration>
    <run-as-user-email>admin@my.web.com</run-as-user-email>

    <company>
        <companywebid>liferay.com</companywebid>
    </company>
  </configuration>

Features

Service Access Policy

Service access policy is a second from four of Liferay’s API security layers. Together with IP Permission Layer, Authentication and verification layer and User permission layer is responsible for securing access to web services provided by portal instance.

If you develop new REST Builder REST/GraphQL endpoint’s it’s a common requirement to setup an access for those API’s for an unauthenticated portal user- Guest which is by default forbidden.

Add new or update existing Service Access Policy by name

<company-settings>
    <service-access-policies>
        <service-access-policy name="MY_ACCESS_POLICY" enabled="true" unauthenticated="true">
            <title locale="sk_SK" text="Moja pristupova politika" />
            <allowed-service-signatures> (1)
                com.liferay.headless.admin.user.internal.resource.v1_0.SiteResourceImpl#getSite
            </allowed-service-signatures>
        </service-access-policy>
    </service-access-policies>
</company>

1. allowed-service-signatures provides the same functionality as Advanced Mode

Delete existing Service Access Policy by name

<company-settings>
    <service-access-policies>
        <delete-service-access-policy name="WIZARD_GUEST_ACCESS"/>
    </service-access-policies>
</company-settings>

Permissions

Resource permissions.

<resource-permissions>
    <resource resource-id="my.custom.resource.string">
        <actionId name="SPECIAL_PERMISSION">
            <role name="My Role"/>
            <role name="Your Role"/>
        </actionId>
    </resource>
</resource-permissions>

Resource permissions are set per company are verifiable with followin API call.

permissionChecker.hasPermission(
            groupId,
            "my.custom.resource.string",
            companyId,
            "SPECIAL_PERMISSION"
        );

Portlet permissions.

<resource-permissions>
    <resource resource-id="myportlet_WAR_portlets">
        <actionId name="VIEW">
            <role name="User"/>
            <role name="Guest"/>
        </actionId>
    </resource>
</resource-permissions>

Roles

<roles>
    <role name="Regular Role"/>
    <role name="Site Role" type="site"/>
<roles>

Expando attribute

Following snippet creates expando attribute canonical-url with permissions to view by guest user.

<custom-fields>
    <field name="canonical-url" type="string" class-name="com.liferay.portal.kernel.model.Layout">
        <role-permission role-name="Guest" permission="view"/>
    </field>
</custom-fields>

Site

Site element must always have site-friendly-url attribute. Guest site is determined by default attribute with true value. All content like pages, articles, documents etc. is always created within a specific site.

<sites>
    <site default="true" site-friendly-url="/guest">
    </site>
    <site default="false" site-friendly-url="/admin">
        <name>Admin</name>
        <name-translation locale="en_US" text="Admin"/>
    </site>
</sites>

Journal Article structure and template

Files new_structure.xml and new_structure_template.ftl are deployed as a part of a module that is using the db-setup-core library and reside in it’s classpath.

    <site site-friendly-url="/admin">
      <article-structure key="NEW-STRUCTURE-KEY"
                         path="new_structure.xml"
                         name="New Structure"/>

      <article-template key="NEW-STRUCTURE-TEMPLATE-KEY"
                        path="new_structure_template.ftl"
                        article-structure-key="NEW-STRUCTURE-KEY" name="New Structure Template" cacheable="true"/>

      <name>Admin</name>
    </site>

Articles

File artcle.xml is deployed as a part of a module that is using the db-setup-core library and reside in it’s classpath.

<sites>
    <site>
        <article
            title="Article Title"
            path="article.xml"
            article-structure-key="NEW-STRUCTURE-KEY"
            article-template-key="NEW-STRUCTURE-TEMPLATE-KEY"
            articleId="ARTICLE_ID">
            <tag name="product" />
        </article>
    </site>
</sites>

Document

Document’s file itself is determined by file-system-name attribute which defines resource on classpath.

<sites>
    <site>
        <document file-system-name="image.svg"
                  document-folder-name="/Images"
                  document-filename="image.svg"
                  document-title="image.svg"/>
    </site>
</sites>

Liferay Portal requirements

The code is compatible with Liferay Portal 7.4.3.86. Other versions that have been or are supported:

1. Liferay Portal EE/CE 7.3.6

2. Liferay Portal EE/CE 7.3.5

3. Liferay Portal EE/CE 7.1.2

4. Liferay Portal EE/CE 6.2.5 and higher

Roadmap

• integration with Site Initializers

• more tests

• project integration with lundegaard fork: https://github.com/lundegaard/liferay-db-setup-core, until than changes and fixes from lundegaard fork will be ported to the library

Motivation

We use Liferay as an application building platform.

Portlets, content and permissions, in short- data serve as a building block of a web application with consistent portal UX. In the use case the data play important role in application building, greatly influencing UX.

By storing the application data as XML declaration we enable developers to version and progress data development as if it was a code. All standard development practices like versioning, code review, building and deployment can be applied to the Liferay data as code.

Contributing

Want/need to hack on db-setup-core? See our super short contributing guide for information on building, testing and contributing changes.

They are probably not perfect, please let me know if anything feels wrong or incomplete.

Changelog

Version 7.4.3860

Features & bug fixes

• switched to JDK11

• upgraded and tested all features in example setup with Liferay Portal 7.4.3.86

• attached two tests from lundegaard fork, credit goes to Jakub Jandak, thank you!

Refactorings & project changes

• improved documentation

Version 7.3.605

Features & bug fixes

• fixed bug when handling multiline service access policy

Version 7.3.604

Features & bug fixes

• added an ability to create/update/delete Service Access Policies

Refactorings & project changes

• refactored common mock setup into a separate class

Version 7.3.603

Features & bug fixes

• fixed setup for multiple companies/groups

Refactorings & project changes

• upgraded test harness to latest mockito, added basic tests for multiple company/groups setup execution

• fixed SonarCloud scan integration with GitHub actions, TODO: pull request decoration

Version 7.3.602

Features & bug fixes

• fixed configuration related resource reading, library can read e.g. article files from caller bundle, credit goes to Milan Kuljovsky- thank you!

• article-structure-key and article-template-key article element attributes are required as there are no defaults for those values

Version 7.3.601

Features & bug fixes

• target Liferay Portal version is still minimum 7.3.6 (GA7)

• fix: add individual resource for permissions setup in case there are declared not for portlet but a model-resource, allows to use hasUserPermission method for the custom resource id string and a primKey = companyId

  Fixed configuration

      <resource-permissions>
          <resource resource-id="custom.resource.id-not.a.portlet.id">
              <actionId name="SOME_PERMISSION">
                  <role name="Some Portal Role"/>

Refactorings & project changes

• version changed from 4 to 3 numbers, build version will increment every time there is a new feature or bugfix

• improved docs

Version 7.3.6.0

Features & bug fixes

• Bumped target Liferay Portal version to minimum 7.3.6 ga7.

• Improved category/vocabulary idempotency, it’s possible to update categories and vocabularies with optional uuid, before categories/vocabularies were identified only by name. That allows to update a category name which wasn’t possible before.

• Improved categories/vocabulary updates performance, update is only issued if anything in the definition differs compared to the data in the DB.

• Category by_name search is scoped only to a particular vocabulary.

• Added property element in categories that allows to define AssetCategoryProperty. These are identified by a key.

  Tip	TODO: deletion of existing property.

Refactorings & project changes

• divided xsd to "elements" and "types" parts, replaced many element references with types which improves naming flexibility

• every xsd type follows is camel cased and suffixed with word: Type, e.g. UuidType

• simplified dependency management with release.portal.bom

• removed shade maven plugin as portal exports com.liferay.portlet.asset.util package already in org.eclipse.osgi_3.13.0.LIFERAY-PATCHED-11 bundle

Version 7.3.5.0

Features & bug fixes

• OSGI descriptors in JAR, the bundle can be deployed and work as a standalone Liferay 7.x bundle

• instance import feature added, credit goes to @bimki - thank you!

• portal properties feature added, credit goes to @fabalint - thank you!

• new helper methods to run the setup (ported from 1.x branch):

  • com.ableneo.liferay.portal.setup.LiferaySetup#setup(java.io.InputStream)

  • com.ableneo.liferay.portal.setup.LiferaySetup#setup(java.io.File)

• fixed categorization idempotency (vocabulary and category name handling)

• fixed language handling for groups

Refactorings & project changes

• improved javadoc in entrypoint com.ableneo.liferay.portal.setup.LiferaySetup class

• upped dependencies to Liferay 7.3.5, credit goes to @fabalint - thank you!

• changed versioning so that major.minor.patch version reflects target platform, build version will be used to track changes in the library

• documentation format conversion from markdown to aciidoc

• added slf4j and changed logger in few classes for more ergonomic log message interpolation (Liferay 7.x provides slf4j by default)

• added prettier formatter to the project

• added build environment setup automation with nix

Version 2.2.0-SNAPSHOT

Features & bug fixes

• it’s possible to use more than one company id per configuration file, the configuration will be applied to all listed companies

• tag names in configuration follow unified naming convention: word-word

• run-as-user renamed to run-as-user-email to be explicit about expected value

• added missing documentation to few xml elements

• setup xsd provides a version attribute

Refactorings & project changes

• configured sonar analysis on each commit

• configured maven test / coverage runner

• maven project structure has changed to single-module

• companyId, groupId and runAsUserId are set in Setup class and propagated to all involved Utils with SetupConfigurationThreadLocal context class

• improved MarshallUtil performance

• introduced unit tests

• most of the problems reported by sonar are fixed

• improved logging

Version 2.1.4

Features & bug fixes

• Added resource class name when creating ADT

• Fix user expando assignement

• Allow add categories and summaries to articles