Liferay and Vaadin 7

[Frans (Frans Flippo)]

Hi,

We’re trying to upgrade our Vaadin 6 portlets on Liferay 6.0.x to Vaadin 7. It’s been a process, but almost everthing works… except for add-on widgets. We need to build a custom widget set containing all our add-ons as well as the default liferay widgets. We’ve donwloaded and installed the latest Vaadin Control panel and it seems to work. That is, it succesfully compiles a widget set, and we can see it’s created on disk, but Vaadin keeps using the DefaultWidgetset.

The Book says in chapter 12.5 “Installing Vaadin in Liferay” (
https://vaadin.com/book/vaadin7/-/page/portal.liferay.html
):

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=liferay

and

vaadin.widgetset The widget set class to use. Give the full path to the class name in the dot notation. If the parameter is not given, the default widget set is used.

But
https://vaadin.com/wiki/-/wiki/Main/Migrating+from+Vaadin+6+to+Vaadin+7
says:

The current default widgetset is com.vaadin.DefaultWidgetSet and should be inherited by custom widgetsets, although com.vaadin.terminal.gwt.DefaultWidgetset still exists for backwards compatibility. DefaultWidgetSet is also used on portals, replacing PortalDefaultWidgetSet.

As it turns out, the Vaadin Control Panel for Liferay picks up the vaadin.widgetset parameter and creates the new custom widget set there, but Vaadin iitself always looks at the default widget set under com.vaadin.DefaultWidgetSet. If the vaadin.widgetset parameter is not defined in portal-ext.properties, Vaadin still picks com.vaadin.DefaultWidgetSet and the Control Panel still picks com.vaadin.portal.gwt.PortalDefaultWidgetSet. If I change the vaadin.widgetset parameter in portal-ext.properties, compiling the widgset using the Control Panel suddenly starts giving all kinds of strange errors.

With Vaadin 6, building the new widget set in place (i.e. in com.vaadin.portal.gwt.PortalDefaultWidgetSet) just worked, so something must have changed here.

Can someone from the Vaadin team explain this in a bit more detail and/or correct the documentation where it is misleading?

Thanks!
Frans

[Frans (Frans Flippo)]

OK, odd, if I choose a widget set name that didn’t exist yet, then it works: both the Control Panel and Vaadin itself use it. E.g.

# Portal-wide widget set
vaadin.widgetset=com.vaadin.LiferayWidgetSet

It appears that the fact that I already had a com.vaadin.portal.gwt.PortalDefaultWidgetSet (from Vaadin 6 times) created the problems…

[Rahul29 (Rahul Pande)]

Hi Frans,

We also have similar requirement for updating to Vaadin 7 from lower versions. We are stuck on handling the basic portlet lifecycle methods like render, action in Vaadin 7 portlet. Please post a sample Vaadin 7 portlet if possible

Can you please explain the steps that need to be followed for migration ?

Thank you,
Rahul Pande