Alfresco JSR 168 portlet deployed in uPortal 2.5.3

[lfuller]

With some very small modifications to the alfresco war (none code related) I've been able to successfully deploy the Alfresco portlet into uPortal 2.5.3.  In most respects it appears to run very nicely, however I'm experiencing one problem that I hope is simply a configuration error on my part.
I'm able to log into Alfresco as an admin, and add content. If I add content to the guest user, then I'm able to also download the content from Alfresco. Unfortunately, if I attempt to download content that has been added to the admin user, I am presented with an Alfresco login page. If I input the admin user and password, then I'm presented with an Alfresco login page again… and no content is pulled down.

any help would be greatly appreciated.

[paulhh]

Hi

It would be useful if you could record what steps you took to get it working in uPortal (I'm sure there will be others that are interested).

When you say you have problems downloading content, do you just mean by clicking on the document in the web client?  Perhaps you could give more details on the exact steps so we can understand the scenario properly.

Thanks
Paul.

[kevinr]

We have had to implement a "generic" solution for the various JSR-168 compatible portals out there, but there may be specific issues with uPortal that we need to resolve. As Paul says, if you can provide info on the steps then we should be able to help.

Thanks,

Kevin

[lfuller]

Sorry for the late reply, the last two weeks have been pretty hectic.  One week in Boston and the next at Heartland college to teach a portlet training class with Cris Holdorph.
However, I had a day to re-examine the alfresco portlet in uPortal and am happy to say that the portlet appears to be 100% functional.  Kevin's comments regarding session attributes led me in the right direction.  The problem proved to be a configuration issue in tomcat.  I didn't know that sharing such data between the PortletSession and another webapp required emptySessionPath to be set to true in tomcat's server.xml connector config.

So, the changes necessary for deploying alfresco's portlet are:
1) modify the portlet.xml file to conform to the JSR 168 spec by adding the expiration-cache element.  (uPortal tends to be very picky about this where as many other portal's will ignore it even though the spec requires the tag)

2) remove portlet-api-lib.jar from WEB-INF\lib  uPortal often has issues if this jar is present within a portlet.

3) modifying tomcat's server.xml to include emptySessionPath="true" setting within the Connector definition.

NOTE: with these changes in place the standard method for deploying and publishing a portlet to uPortal may be used (portlet definition ID: alfresco.AlfrescoClient).

Thank you for your time and patience in this matter.

[paulhh]

Hi

Thanks for your work on this - we really appreciate your help on getting Alfresco working with uPortal.

Cheers
Paul