Adding customization fields in JPDK portlet

Question

we need to create a portlet which can be customized to add more than one set of 4 fields. Everytime a new set is added the 4 fields will repeat. Also we want ot give user opton of adding more sets. A set can be considered as an object and we basically need a collection of objects as portlet customization. I saw name value pair customization object but can that handle lists?

Answer 1

Hi,
The NameValuePersonalization Object can only persist simple data types (char,short, int, String) or arrays of basic data types (String[], int[], float[]). It cannot personalize user defined java objects onto file preference store. Having said that, you will have to devise a way so that you can personalize your objects onto preference store by mapping to the preference store data types mentioned above. Consider this example,
class UserProfile{
String userName;
String userId;
//getter methods for member variables
UserProfile[] up //up is an array of UserProfile objects that you need to persist on the preference store. Since, UserProfile is a user defined object, it cannot be persisted as is.
class MyPersonalizationObject extends NameValuePersonalizationObject{
public static final String NAME = "NAME";
public static final String USERID = "USERID";
public static final String EQUALS = "=";
public static final String DELIMITER = ",";
//extending the NVPO to store your custom object
void storeUserProfiles(UserProfile[] up, String userProfileKey)
int count = up.length;
String[] upToStringArray = new String[count]; //create a string array to map each UserProfile object to an element in the String Array i.e. up[0] ----> upToStringArray[0]
String name = null;
String id = null;
StringBuffer sb = new StringBuffer(100);
for ( int i = 0; i < count ; i++ )
name = up.getUserName();
id = up[i].getUserId();
sb.append(NAME).append(EQUALS).append(name).
.append(DELIMITER).append(USERID).equals(id);
//eg. NAME=john,USERID=100 is the content of an array element
upToStringArray[i] = sb.toString();
sb.setLength(0);
//now persist this String Array on preference store
putStringArray(userProfileKey, upToStringArray);
//fetch UserProfile from preference store
UserProfile[] getUserProfiles(String userProfileKey)
//listing the steps
//retrieve the string array
for each element in the array
first stringtokenize it on DELIMITER
then stringTokenize the elements got in the previous step on EQUALS
extract name, id values
construct UserProfile object by passing the value got above
//return the array of UserProfile objects
Hope this is of help.
Regards,
Abhinav