Liferay Mobile SDK + Android + Custom Services part-2

Hello guys,

Please refer Liferay Mobile SDK + Custom Services part-1 for getting idea of what this post is all about.

Now we have our service running on our local server and also we have Liferay mobile SDK for building custom jar.

Lets see how to do it,

1) Go to downloaded Liferay Mobile SDK folder (picture shown below)

2) This project already ships the Gradle Wrapper (gradlew) with it, you don't need to install Gradle's command line tool (gradle).
 Now you have to set some properties before building 

1. Edit gradle.properties, if you don't want to change that file directly, you can also copy it to ~/.gradle and modify it there. Alternatively, you can also edit the gradle.properties inside each platform folder (ios/ or android/).
2. Here are the important properties to set:
• url - The URL to your Liferay instance.
• context - Your portlet's web context. Say for example you are generating an SDK for Liferay's Calendar portlet, which is generally deployed to the calendar-portlet context, then you should set your context value to context=calendar-portlet. Under the hood, the SDK Builder will try to access http://localhost:8080/calendar-portlet/api/jsonws?discover to find out which services are available for this portlet. Check in a browser if this URL is working before running the SDK. If it's not running, you may have forgotten to run ant build-wsdd on the portlet.
• filter - Specifies your portlet's entities whose services to access; a blank value indicates the services of all of the portlet's entities. For example, the Calendar portlet has entities such as CalendarBooking and CalendarResource. To generate an SDK for only the CalendarBooking entity, set the filter's value to calendarbooking, all in lowercase. The SDK Builder will then make requests to the http://localhost:8080/calendar-portlet/api/jsonws?discover=/calendarbooking/*. If you set filter=, specifying no filter value, the remote services of all of the portlet's entities will be made available to your mobile SDK.
• package - On Android, this is the package to which your SDK's classes are written. The iOS platform does not use packages. Note, that the Liferay Portal version is appended to the end of the package name. So, if you specified com.liferay.mobile.android as your package, the SDK Builder appends the Liferay Portal version (e.g., v62) to it, like com.liferay.mobile.android.v62. Appending the Liferay Portal version prevents collisions between classes with the same names written for different versions of Liferay Portal.
• destination - Specifies the root folder in which to save your generated files. On Android, by default, the files are saved to android/src/gen/java. On iOS, the files are saved by default to ios/src/gen.
• version - The version number is appended to the jar and zip file names, see more about that in the following sections.

Example file for our portlet is given below:

 ##  
 ## SDK Builder  
 ##  
      url=http://localhost:8080  
      context=custom-mob-app-service-portlet   
      filter=  
      packageName=com.liferay.mobile.android//you can provide custom name 
      destination=gen  
 ##  
 ## Build  
 ##  
      version=6.2.0.1  

"custom-mob-app-service-portlet" is our deployed portlet on local server.Filter is empty because we want all other default services.
Save it.

3.To build the service related source files for your Liferay Android SDK, run the following command from the android/ folder:

gradlew buildService

The source files are written to the android/src/gen/java folder by default.

To build a .jar file containing the generated service and utility classes, run the following command:

gradlew jar

The liferay-android-sdk-[version].jar file is written to your android/build/libs folder. You're ready to use the liferay-android-sdk-[version].jar in your Android project, there are no external dependencies.

4. Within your Android project, drop the JAR into the /libs folder. Android Developer Tools should automatically add this JAR to your classpath. If you are using a different IDE, make sure this JAR is added to the project classpath.

ANDDD Done...

Now you can use that custom services of "custom-mob-app-service-portlet" in your android app without knowing any Liferay side coding ;)

Please note that the custom service name would be the name of the entity defined in service.xml file which we have seen in 1st Part of the POST.

Still yes still ....In the next post we are going to see how you can do Async call of Liferay services in android app.

see you soon...:D
NEXT