This is a portlet application which presents published document lists and allows access to the documents. It is integrated with iFeed as the document lists are fetched from iFeed. IFeed delivers metadata, e.g. the URL to the document. The client may therefore request the application to present the document on that URL.
The application may be used without logging in. Only if any admin functionality is to be used, or if the application is accessed from outside the firewall, login is required.
In the main view the user can choose a chapter to the left:
The user may then choose a document in the list after which the document is presented inline:
A user who has been granted permission to manage the chapter list may click the "Administrera" link in the upper right:
The chapters are added toghether with its Ifeed ID.
The portal administrator also has permission to access the portlet settings:
The top section contains settings which are global and thus not related to a specific portlet instance. There the available reference guides are configured.
From the available reference guides, configured in the top section, a choice of which reference guide this specific portlet instance uses is made.
At the bottom section the users' VGR ID is given in order to give them access to the "Administrera" link and view.
The project is part of the Region of Västra Götaland's commitment to open source software within Öppna Program.
The application is a portlet with a small layer of Spring Portlet MVC and Angular as front-end technology. The front-end communicates with a Spring Rest back-end. The rest back-end is stateless but is deployed in the portlet war file. The persistence is kept in a PostgreSQL database.
The major software components/frameworks are listed below:
- Liferay Portal 6.2
- Spring Portlet MVC 4.3.6
- Spring Framework 4.3.6
- Hibernate
- Angular
- PostgreSQL 9.5
This is kind of a special case regarding authentication. The portal uses cookie based authentication while the rest web service preferably utilizes something stateless like JWT. But since the application is run in a portal the portal is the part who owns the authentication.
The solution used here is that the portlet backend issues a JWT, which only is done if the user is logged in, which the client can use in order to communicate with the rest layer. Note that only write operations to the rest layer requires authentication and authorization.
An issue is that the Angular application has no way to detect when the user logs out of the portal. So to remedy this issue the JWT is issued for short periods and renewed whenever needed.
The documents are made available through the back-end through proxying. So the documents are available to the client independently of whether the documents are avialable directly from the source to the client. Some documents are only accessible from within the firewalls, but as the application is accessible from outside the firewall also those documents are accessible by means of proxying through the application.
The fetching of documents are made by the client who requests the server to deliver a document from a specified URL. It is important that the client can't instruct the server to fetch arbitrary URL:s. To constrain the client from making the server request arbitrary resources the URL:s delivered to the client are paired with a HMAC. The HMAC must be delivered to the server and must be verified in order for the server to deliver the document. So only authenticated requests will be fulfilled.
Make sure the following is installed:
- Java >= 8
- Maven
Clone the Git repository and run mvn package and deploy core-bc/modules/portlet/target/handbok.war to the deploy
directory of Liferay. Building the application has no prior dependency of Node or NPM; they are downloaded during the
Maven build.
To build with ahead-of-time (AOT) and minification compilation, run mvn package -Pprod.