Liferay CRUD portlets with XMLPortletFactory - By Jack Rider

One of the first tasks you find in a project is to create support for the persistence layer, say for example products, clients, suppliers table. This usually accounts for a big load of hours, not to say if you find your self with late changes with fields, versions, requirements....etc

Luckily Liferay developers have this open source tool called XMLPortletFactory, that creates complete portlets with just a small XML definition file, were you can control and implement a load of parameters like:

-       Different field types like: long, int, varchar, text, image, document, boolean, etc.

-       Field combo box validations. Even chaining combos one to another

-       Field regexp validations. Some predefined, but you can make your own.

-       Master and detail files. Even detail files of detail files.

-       Language localization. Today english, french, italian, finnish and spanish.

-       Workflows implementacion.

-       Assets integration, where you can treat your table rows as Liferay assets.

-       Liferay activities can be activated for the portlet operations, like add or edit. Same as with forums or blogs.

-       Automatic portlet installation in control panel if you choose so.

-       Portlet data export-to-excel feature you will love.

-       Calculated fields, so you can display but not persist data.

-       And many, many more.

Here you have an example of a portlet screen that has been generated with the following XML definition.

AssetsIntegration.xml  à http://www.xmlportletfactory.org/documents/10157/33615/AssetsIntegration.xml/d3f0a380-505e-4b66-9aa5-7389041006f9

Find full example in the following URL : http://www.xmlportletfactory.org/assets-integration

One of the greatest benefits I find with this tool, is not just that we get full source code, but the nice posibility of just getting the XML definition, and generate portlets for new Liferay versions as they come out. Just forget of headache of upgrading portles to new portal versions.
                                                                                                   By : Jack Rider