Service Architecture on Liferay Project - Multiple service.xml file

Service Architecture on Liferay Project - Multiple service.xml file

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12/20/12 8:35 AM

The best place to learn Liferay Architecture is the Liferay source code itself. When it comes to creating services in Liferay Usually people create one monolithic service.xml in docroot/WEB-INF folder. Well... that is not the right approach if the number of custom services you intend to develop is large. In one of my projects that I am currently working on, I have 10s of services. The best approach is to create one package structure for each service for e.g. com.mslc.projectname.conceptualnameofservice and create a service.xml file in this package. Different services will have different package structure. You can very well build these services exactly as same as you build services in WEB-INF folder; more conviniently if you have Liferay IDE.  Take a look at Liferay source code and scan through the service.xml files they have create in portal-impl/src folder under package structures like com.liferay.portal, com.liferay.portlet.blogs, com.liferay.portlet.journal etc.

So far so good. But then when you run build-wsdd target in order to generate the service-config.wsdd file in order to expose your service as web service, then you run into problems. By default the build-wsdd target looks for service.xml file in docroot/WEB-INF folder. As mentioned above, the service.xml file can be created in their respective package structure so we do not have service.xml file in docroot/WEB-INF which is expected by build-wsdd. So what do we do ? Here is the solution

1.     open sdk/build-common-plugin file

2.     search for target build-wsdd

3.     you will find one argument called wsdd.input.file in the line which looks like this:

            I.       
<arg value="wsdd.input.file=docroot/WEB-INF/service.xml" />

4.     Change the value to   ${service.input.file}  . This is how the line will look like after changes

    I.     <arg value="wsdd.input.file=${service.input.file}" />

Save the file and run build-wsdd on respective service.xml file. It works like a charm - it generates service-config.wsdd in WEB-INF folder perfectly for each service you build the wsdd for.