Understanding the Two phases of Portlet Execution

Our portlet needs two execution phases, the action phase and the render phase. Multiple execution phases can be confusing to developers used to regular servlet development or used to other environments such as PHP, Python or Ruby. However, once you’re acquainted with them, you’ll find the action and render phase to be simple and useful. Let’s talk about why they’re necessary before defining each phase.

Our portlet doesn’t own the entire HTML page, but shares the page with other portlets and the portal itself. The portal generates the page by invoking one or more portlets and adding some additional HTML around them. When a user invokes an action within a portlet, each of the page’s portlets are rendered anew. The portal can’t just allow each portlet to repeat its last invocation, and the scenario described below illustrates why.

Pretend we have a page with two portlets: a navigation portlet and a shopping portlet. Here’s what would happen to a user if portals didn’t have two execution phases:

  1. First, the user would navigate to an item she wants to buy, and eventually submit the order, charging an amount on her credit card. After this operation, the portal would also invoke the navigation portlet with its default view.

  2. Next, say the user clicks a link in the navigation portlet. This initiates an HTTP request/response cycle, and causes the content of the portlet to change. But all the parameters are preserved during that cycle, including the ones from the shopping cart! Since the portal must also show the content of the shopping portlet, it repeats the last action (the one in which the user clicked a button), which causes a new charge on the credit card and the start of a new shipping process!

Why does this happen? Because the portal cannot know at runtime which portlets a user has added to a page. Obviously, when writing a standard web application, developers can take design it so that certain URLs perform actions, and certain URLs navigate to other pages. Since an end user of a portal can add any portlet to a page, the portal must separate “actions” from a simple re-draw (or re-render) of the portlet.

Obviously, we’d like to avoid the situation described in step 2 above, but without the two phases, the portal wouldn’t know whether the last operation on a portlet was an action. It would have no option but to repeat the last action over and over to obtain the content of the portlet (at least until the Credit Card reached its limit).

Fortunately, that’s not how portals work. To prevent situations like the one described above, the portlet specification defines two phases for every request of a portlet, allowing the portal to differentiate when an action is being performed (and should not be repeated) and when the content is being produced (rendered):

  • Action phase: The action phase can only be invoked for one portlet at a time. It is the result of a user interaction with the portlet. In this phase the portlet can change its status, for instance changing the user preferences of the portlet. Any inserts and modifications in the database or operations that should not be repeated must be performed in this phase.
  • Render phase: The render phase is always invoked for all portlets on the page after the action phase (which may or not exist). This includes the portlet that also had executed its action phase. It’s important to note that the order in which the render phase of the portlets in a page gets executed is not guaranteed by the portlet specification. Liferay has an extension to the specification through the element render-weight in liferay-portlet.xml. Portlets with a higher render weight will be rendered before those with a lower weight.

In our example so far, we’ve used a portlet class called MVCPortlet. That’s all the portlet needs if it only has a render phase. In order to be able to add custom code that’s executed in the action phase (and thus is not executed when the portlet is shown again) you must create a subclass of MVCPortlet or create a subclass of GenericPortlet directly (if you don’t want to use Liferay’s lightweight framework).

Our example above could be enhanced by creating the following class:

package com.liferay.samples;

import java.io.IOException;
import javax.portlet.ActionRequest;
import javax.portlet.ActionResponse;
import javax.portlet.PortletException;
import javax.portlet.PortletPreferences;
import com.liferay.util.bridges.mvc.MVCPortlet;

public class MyGreetingPortlet extends MVCPortlet {
    public void processAction(
        ActionRequest actionRequest, ActionResponse actionResponse)
        throws IOException, PortletException {
        PortletPreferences prefs = actionRequest.getPreferences();
        String greeting = actionRequest.getParameter("greeting");

        if (greeting != null) {
            prefs.setValue("greeting", greeting);

        super.processAction(actionRequest, actionResponse);

Create the above class, and its package, in the directory docroot/WEB-INF/src in your portal project.

The file portlet.xml must also be changed so that it points to your new class:

<display-name>My Greeting</display-name>

Finally, make a minor change in the edit.jsp file, changing the URL to which the form is sent in order to let the portal know to execute the action phase. There are three types of URLs that can be generated by a portlet:

  • renderURL: Invokes a portlet using only its render phase.
  • actionURL: Executes an action phase before rendering all the portlets in the page.
  • resourceURL: Is used to retrieve images, XML, JSON or any other type of resource. It’s often used to dynamically generate images or other media types, as well as makng AJAX requests to the server. Most importanlty, it differs from the other two in that the portlet has full control of the data that is sent in response.

Let’s change the edit.jsp file to use an actionURL, using the JSP tag of the same name. We’ll also remove the previous code that was saving the preference. Overwrite the edit.jsp file contents with the following:

<%@ taglib uri="http://liferay.com/tld/aui" prefix="aui" %>

<%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.ParamUtil" %>
<%@ page import="com.liferay.portal.kernel.util.Validator" %>
<%@ page import="javax.portlet.PortletPreferences" %>

<portlet:defineObjects />

    PortletPreferences prefs = renderRequest.getPreferences();
    String greeting = (String)prefs.getValue(
        "greeting", "Hello! Welcome to our portal.");

<portlet:actionURL var="editGreetingURL">

<aui:form action="<%= editGreetingURL %>" method="post">
        <aui:input label="greeting" name="greeting" type="text" value="<%=
    greeting %>" />
        <aui:button type="submit" />

<portlet:renderURL var="viewGreetingURL">
        <portlet:param name="mvcPath" value="/view.jsp" />

<p><a href="<%= viewGreetingURL %>">&larr; Back</a></p>

Deploy the portlet again after making these changes; everything should work exactly like before. Well, almost. Unless you paid close attention, you may have missed something: the portlet no longer shows a message to the user that the preference has been saved after she clicks the save button. To implement that, information must pass from the action phase to the render phase, so that the JSP knows that the preference has just been saved and can show a message to the user.

« Writing the My Greeting PortletPassing Information from the Action Phase to the Render Phase »
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