Portal URL from Portlet

Question

Is it possible to get the Portal base URL (like http://www.thisismyportal.com) from a Portlet using Portlet 2.0 API?

Right now I'm planning to manually build it concatenating PorletRequest.getServerName(), PortletRequest.getServerPort() and PortletRequest.getContextPath(); but it seems kind of clumsy (and there's no PortletRequest.getProtocol())

Answer 1

We had those configuration properties in Resource Environment Provider for the purpose of generating external URLs for sending them in emails. It was specific solution and it wasn't a problem for us as we had other properties stored there as well so we knew it will be available at runtime. I don't know if that suits your needs. It depends on your scenario. Also, we used https only during login, so we always generated http URLs.

Hope this helps.

Answer 2

While it is clumsy, it is the safest way to construct the URL; and while there is no PortletRequest.getProtocol() method, you can conclude the protocol using the PortletRequest.isSecure() method.

I would advise against using an external configuration for the base URL, for a couple of reasons.

First, it would be yet another configuration item for you to maintain across environments (test, integration, production and so forth). There's very little justification to hold, in configuration, something that is fully reproducible using the current request.

Second, under certain circumstances, it might be impossible to designate a particular URL as a "base URL" for the portal. An example would be the case in which the portal server is associated with multiple hosts, or multiple host aliases.