Use Portal 6.0 Advanced URL Generation Helper Class ServletURLGenerator to Generate URL of portlet

Intention

In some cases, you might want to open a single portlet in a new window in solo state (which hides the portal theme elements, like a banner, page navigation, or tool bar), for example,

This main portlet contains one link, after click the link, the PopUpTest portlet which resides on the XuTest2 page will be displayed on a new window.

 

The XuTest2 page has more than one portlet:

 therefore, the question comes: how to generate url of the target portlet. WebSphere Portal 6.0 provides some advanced URL generation helper classes to solve this problem. I am going to demonstrate the usage of ServeletURLGenerator.generateUrlForFlyout.

Investigating the generateUrlForFlyout function

public static EngineURL generateUrlForFlyout(

                  String pageName, String portletName, 

                  HttpServletRequest request,

                  HttpServletResponse response)*

* This is the updated version of the one provide on Portal 6.0.x Advanced URL Generation Helper classes.

This function requires four parameters where

• pageName: the unique name of the target portlet page
• portletName: the unique name of target PortletWindow

To set the unique name of page, you can use either XMLAccess or through “Manage Custom Unique Names” portlet:

To set the unique name of PortletWindow, the only way is through XMLAccess to set the unique name of the component that holds the portlet instance on the page:

<component action="update" active="true" deletable="undefined" domain="rel" modifiable="undefined" objectid="7_EKLFRHG008K3502T2LOQD130K2" ordinal="200" type="control" uniquename="xu.test.popuptest" width="undefined">

<portletinstance action="update" domain="rel" objectid="5_EKLFRHG008K3502T2LOQD130K4" portletref="3_EKLFRHG008K3502T2LOQD13040"/>

</component>

About how to do it, please refer to step1-4 of URLGeneration in WebSphere Portal v5.1.x - Linking to another portlet

Restrictions

As we see from the function above, to get it work, the target portlet must be assigned to a known page, which means, this API will not work if the portlet does not map to a page.

Code to generate URL

On the MainPortletView.jsp, we use the following code to generate URL of target portlet:

<%

try {

      String pageName = "co.at.profile.XuTest2";

      String portletName = "xu.test.popuptest";

      EngineURL targetURLStr = ServletURLGenerator.generateUrlForFlyout(

                             pageName, portletName, request, response);

%>

      <h:form id="form1" styleClass="form">

            <br>

            <a href='<%=targetURLStr %>'target="_new">Link</a>

      </h:form>

Of course, to avoid the resolve exceptions, you need to include the necessary classes:

<%@page language="java" contentType="text/html"

      pageEncoding="ISO-8859-1" session="false"

      import="com.ibm.wps.l2.urlgeneration.helper.*,

      com.ibm.portal.state.EngineURL"%>

Resources

Portal 6.0.x Advanced URL Generation Helper classes.

URLGeneration in WebSphere Portal v5.1.x - Linking to another portlet

BTW, many thanks to James Barnes.