Leveraging Liferay’s Scripting Console
Recently, we were faced with a challenge. We were trying to add a new page to Liferay with a specific name friendly URL but when we went to add the page we saw an error indicating the URL was already in use.
This particular site has hundreds of pages and the friendly URL didn’t appear to match any existing pages. We spent a few minutes clicking through trying to locate the conflicting page without any luck. We followed the link lead to a PDF on the site but the page name used to configure it still wasn’t obvious. We needed a better approach to solve this.
Enter Liferay’s scripting console.
In version 6.0, Liferay added a scripting console to the Server Administration section of the control panel. This is a powerful tool that we frequently use during development, debugging and prototyping. This was the perfect place to run a quick query to figure this out.
We wrote a simple groovy script. Given a friendly URL this script will return the associated page name.
import com.liferay.portal.service.LayoutLocalServiceUtil
friendlyURL = ‘/third-quarter-report’
groupId = 10182
boolean privateLayout = false;
layout1 =
LayoutLocalServiceUtil.getFriendlyURLLayout(groupId, privateLayout, friendlyURL)
out.println(layout1.getFriendlyURL() + ‘ : ‘ + layout1.getName());
We ran the script, identified the conflicting page and worked with the marketing team to resolve the conflict.
Liferay’s scripting console has uses beyond simple queries. We also use it for:
- Bulk user maintenance
- Automating setup and configuration steps such as creating pages, users and roles
- During development to quickly test Liferay APIs and verify results
- As a rapid prototyping tool during development
- Scripting repetitive operations and maintenance tasks
- More complex queries to identify and resolve issues
The scripting console is a powerful feature within Liferay and shouldn’t be overlooked. For more information refer to:
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