Retrieving Guestbooks and Entries by Status

Supporting Workflow at the Service Layer
Step 3 of 3

The service implementation for both entities now supports adding the status fields to the database tables. There’s one more update to make in the service layer, but to understand why, you must think about the view layer. When the Guestbook portlet displays entries, you must make sure it doesn’t show entries that haven’t been approved. Currently, the entry’s view layer shows all guestbooks:

	List<Guestbook> guestbooks = GuestbookLocalServiceUtil
				.getGuestbooks(scopeGroupId);

There’s a problem: the getter only takes the scopeGroupId as a parameter, so there’s no way to get guestbooks by their status.

Likewise, unapproved entries must not be displayed, but the view layer currently gets all entries:

    <liferay-ui:search-container total="<%=GuestbookEntryLocalServiceUtil.getGuestbookEntriesCount()%>">
    <liferay-ui:search-container-results
        results="<%=GuestbookEntryLocalServiceUtil.getGuestbookEntries(scopeGroupId.longValue(),
                        guestbookId, searchContainer.getStart(),
                        searchContainer.getEnd())%>" />

The solution is to implement for guestbooks and entries a getter that takes the status field as a parameter. Thankfully, Service Builder makes it easy.

Open the guestbook-service module’s service.xml file.

1. For the GuestbookEntry entity, remove the following finder:

    <finder name="G_S" return-type="Collection">
      <finder-column name="groupId" />
      <finder-column name="status" />
    </finder>
   

2. Add this finder in its place:

   <finder name="G_G_S" return-type="Collection">
      <finder-column name="groupId" />
      <finder-column name="guestbookId" />
      <finder-column name="status" />
   </finder>
   

Run service builder (double-click guestbook-service/build/buildService in the Gradle Tasks pane). Service Builder generates finder methods in the persistence layer that take the specified fields (for example, status) as parameters.

Calling the Persistence Layer

Don’t call the persistence layer directly in the application code. Instead expose the new persistence methods in the service layer.

1. Open GuestbookLocalServiceImpl, add this getter, and save the file:

   public List<Guestbook> getGuestbooks(long groupId, int status)
   	throws SystemException {
   
   	return guestbookPersistence.findByG_S(
   		groupId, WorkflowConstants.STATUS_APPROVED);
   }
   

   This getter gets only approved guestbooks. That’s why you hard code the workflow constant STATUS_APPROVED into the status parameter when calling the persistence method.

2. Now open GuestbookEntryLocalServiceImpl, add these two getters, and save the file:

   public List<GuestbookEntry> getGuestbookEntries(
   	long groupId, long guestbookId, int status, int start, int end)
   	throws SystemException {
   
   	return guestbookEntryPersistence.findByG_G_S(
   		groupId, guestbookId, WorkflowConstants.STATUS_APPROVED);
   }
   
   public int getGuestbookEntriesCount(
   	long groupId, long guestbookId, int status)
   	throws SystemException {
   
   	return guestbookEntryPersistence.countByG_G_S(
   		groupId, guestbookId, WorkflowConstants.STATUS_APPROVED);
   }
   

   You’ll replace the existing methods with these getGuestbookEntries and getGuestbookEntriesCount methods in the view layer, ensuring that only approved entries are displayed.

3. Save the file, run Service Builder, and refresh the Gradle project.

The work here relates to the UI updates you’ll make later. Next, you must implement workflow handlers so that you can call the updateStatus service method when the entity returns from the workflow framework.

« Setting the Entry Workflow StatusHandling Workflow »