Portal Express, Version 6.0
Operating systems: i5/OS, Linux, Windows
Migrate cooperative portlets that use IBM Portlet API
The term cooperative portlets refers to the capability of portlets on a page to interact with each other by sharing information. One or more cooperative portlets on a portal page can automatically react to changes from a source portlet triggered by an action or event in the source portlet. Portlets that are targets of the event can react so that users are not required to make repetitive changes or actions in other portlets on the page. This provides a coordinated and consistent behavior between the portlets on the page and enhances users' overall experience. Cooperation between source and target portlets is facilitated by a WebSphere Portal Express runtime entity called the property broker. Portlets on a page can cooperate in this way even if they were developed independently, without the programmer's awareness of the existence of the other cooperative portlets.
WebSphere Portal Express supports cross-page portlet communication for cooperative portlets, allowing portlets on different pages to communicate. See Wiring cooperative portlets for information on required administrative setup. In addition, portlets using Struts or JavaServer Faces, as well as portlets using the standard portlet APIs, can use the cooperative portlets features. See Struts integration with cooperative portlets for details.
The steps for migration depend on the pbportlet.jar version that is used by the application. Applications that package more recent versions of the pbportlet.jar may require no changes at all when migrating to the current version. Applications packaging older versions of the pbportlet.jar may require manual migration steps to update the WAR file in order to have the support of cross-page portlet communication. For example, an application which packages the pbportlet.jar version 5.0 requires manual migration if the application will be deployed in the current version. Also, migrating to the latest jar file provides the newest supported code.
Portlet migration
Cooperative portlet applications that used previous versions of the pbportlet.jar file can be migrated to the current version. The steps to migrate a portlet application are updating the pbportlet.jar that your application used.
In the current version installation, locate pbportlet.jar in the portal_server_root/pb/lib directory. This directory contains the pbportlet.jar file that is needed to migrate a cooperative portlet to the current version. Perform the following step to migrate your portlets:
- Copy the pbportlet.jar files from the portal_server_root/pb/lib directory to the WEB-INF/lib directory of the cooperative portlet application you are migrating.
Overwrite the JAR files if they already exist.