Portlet Basics

Question

I am new to weblogic portal .Could any body tell me the following:
-->what is the life cycle of the portlet ?is it different for different types of portlets like
java page flow portlets/struts portlet/JSR 168 portlet etc.Please explain all the possible phases.
-->Can I invoke a portlet directly as we can do in the case of servlet ?
--> What all MIME types are supported by the Weblogic portal 10+ version ?
I need to display the some binary data (images) from database.Can I do it without the use of servlets ?I don't want to use CMS part of weblogic portal
Edited by: rajeevraj on 6 Oct, 2009 12:20 PM

Answer 1

Hello,
In general, the lifecycle of a portlet on every page render is:
1) init (not available for JSR168*)
2) handlePostback (called processAction in JSR168)
3) events (not available in JSR168*)
3) preRender (not available in JSR168*)
4) render
*-- for the lifecycle phases I listed above as "not available in JSR168" they are not available in the JSR168 specification, but they are available in the WLP implementation of JSR168 portlets.
They are the same for every portlet type, although some lifecycles are only available in portlet backing files, and this again depends on the portlet type.
You can invoke a portlet directly, depending on exactly what you want to do with it:
1) you can create a URL render only the portlet, as in a pop-up window
2) you can create a URL to render the portlet and the whole page it is on
3) You can use portlet publishing to include a portlet inside of another page.
The MIME types supported by portal are all text/html or text/xhtml; to serve binary resources in WLP 10.3 or earlier requires creating a URL to an external resource or servlet if you don't use CMS.
Kevin