13.5. Installing Vaadin in Liferay

Loading widget sets, themes, and the Vaadin JAR from a portlet is possible as long as you have a single portlet, but causes a problem if you have multiple portlets. To solve this, Vaadin portlets need to use a globally installed widget set, themes, and Vaadin JAR. They, and all the required configuration, are bundled with Liferay 5.3 and later, but if you are using an earlier version of Liferay or use a custom widget set, custom themes, or a later version of Vaadin, you need to install them in Liferay.

The easiest way to install or upgrade Vaadin or compile the widget set in Liferay is to use the Vaadin Control Panel for Liferay, as described in Section 13.9, “Vaadin Control Panel for Liferay”. If you need to make the installation or compilation manually, read ahead.

In these instructions, we assume that you use Liferay bundled with Apache Tomcat, although you can use almost any other application server with Liferay just as well. The Tomcat installation is included in the Liferay installation package, under the tomcat-x.x.x directory.

The Vaadin JAR should be put in tomcat-x.x.x/webapps/ROOT/WEB-INF/lib/vaadin.jar. The Vaadin version number should normally be left out from the JAR.

The widget set needs to be located at /html/VAADIN/widgetsets/ and themes at /html/VAADIN/themes/ path under the portal context. You simply need to copy the contents from under your WebContent/VAADIN directory to the tomcat-x.x.x/webapps/ROOT/html/VAADIN directory under the Liferay installation directory. If you use a built-in widget set or theme included in the Vaadin JAR, such as the PortalDefaultWidgetSet, you should extract it from the JAR, from under VAADIN/widgetsets. The default themes are located under VAADIN/themes in the JAR.

You need to define the widget set, the theme, and the JAR in the portal-ext.properties configuration file for Liferay, as described earlier. The file should normally be placed in the Liferay installation directory. See Liferay documentation for details on the configuration file.

Below is an example of a portal-ext.properties file:

# Path under which the VAADIN directory is located.
# (/html is the default so it is not needed.)
# vaadin.resources.path=/html

# Portal-wide widget set
vaadin.widgetset=com.vaadin.portal.gwt.PortalDefaultWidgetSet

# Theme to use
vaadin.theme=reindeer

The allowed parameters are:

You will need to restart Liferay after creating or modifying the portal-ext.properties file.