In WebSphere Portal when coming back to Vaadin portlet the state is lost

General
1

Hi,

We found in
WebSphere Portal
 that when you take an action that refreshes the Portal page, like going to another Tab and coming back, the Vaadin portlet re-initializes itself. We are using
Portlet 1.0
 functionality i.e. with the Vaadin Servlet.

It seemed the Application was recreated each time so after further investigation we found the following:

  • PortletApplicationContext, method getApplicationContext, gets the WebApplicationContext from the session and, even if it doesn’t change, adds it back to the session

  • this gets interpreted as an unbound / bound by WebSphere container and

  • triggers the javax.servlet.http.HttpSessionBindingListener#valueUnbound(HttpSessionBindingEvent) method on AbstractWebApplicationContext which

  • closes all applications

We fixed it by adding a flag to both getApplicationContext methods


        boolean newContext = false;

... set flag to true if context is changed ...

        if (newContext == true) {
          session.setAttribute(WebApplicationContext.class.getName(), cx,
                  PortletSession.APPLICATION_SCOPE);
        }

and this solved our problem.


Question
: why is PortletApplicationContext deprecated ? It is used by ApplicationPortlet which is not deprecated and which we subclass.