Import and export of Portal Settings

Started the a thread http://www.liferay.com/community/forums/-/message_boards/message/13388008

The approach would be to implement a DataHandler for the PortalPreferences and attach the same to settings portlet in the Control panel

Well, when i thinked over the issue, I see we might not need DataHandler for this, just to keep things simple as portlet-prefrences going to be xml already we could export the settings as XML and them import as XML.

Implemented the first cut version of the feature, which has the following implemented

• Action classes for Import/Export
• portal_settings/edit_company modified to accommodate Export/Import buttons
• new jsp files added for export_import and export_import_options
• struts-config.xml modified for accommodating the Action classes
• tiles-def.xml modified for accommodating the export/import portal paths in action forwards
• Export works successfully by exporting the Portal preferences as XML

Open Issues which I am trying to resolve

* Import not updating the database table, though the import successfully imports the xml file and triggers saveCompany() of the edit_company, its not updating the table but i see the xml being uploaded properly in from the xml file ,

    I am using the PortalPreferencesLocalServiceUtil.updatePreferences(companyId,ownerType, xml); in my action class to perform this import persistence in DB table
  

Any thoughts to fix the issues will be great

The first cut implementation can be pulled from my gitrepo https://github.com/kameshsampath/liferay-portal/commit/edd0a25184fa46b151d3c32d33aaeb06a5514a74

See https://github.com/brianchandotcom/liferay-portal/pull/5329

Reworking the feature as per Jorge comments and suggestions to prefer using DataHandler and sticking to the conventions as that will enable save us some unwanted UI classes and methods.

Jorge one question I have around the Export/Import controls is :

1. Whether the export and import controls be same in most of the cases ?
2. Are we fine with the default UI provided by the data handler hooking , an export/import icon under the "wrench" ?

how do we get the userUuid or rather the userId which we can use to export the user specific portlet preferences?

I was able to successfully export and import the Portal settings via the datahandler, gave a little rethink on the user preferences import and felt it does not apply in this context as Portal settings will export/import only Company level prefereneces, so dropped that idea.

Right now the challenge is to refresh the cache i.e. clear the cache to make the imported settings reflect immediately in the UI, i tried the manual way of clearing the cache form the Server Admin --> Resources --> Actions

I was able to clear the cache using the following method calls

• CacheRegistryUtil.clear()- to clear all the DB cache
• MultiVMPoolUtil.clear() - clearing cache across JVM clusters
• WebCachePoolUtil.clear() - clearing cache in Single VM

The pull request has the implementation for Export/Import Portal settings

the pull request which has the implementation – https://github.com/JorgeFerrer/liferay-portal/pull/61

updated the branch with the Unit test cases and additional functionalities and for review with Jorge

created a new pull https://github.com/JorgeFerrer/liferay-portal/pull/62 which has the merged commits as per Jorge's comments.

For the record, the review of this contribution showed that it will require a lot of work to be able to pull this into the product since this feature has many implications. It has been decided to leave this task for later, probably after the ongoing refactoring of the import/export functionality is finished.

In preparation for Ideation; we are merging New Feature and Improvement tickets into a singular ticket type called “Feature Request”. Additional information to follow soon.

Any updates on this ticket and the subsequent pull in to code base?