Portlet 2.0 annotations help

[Leonard Damien]

Hi,
I am working on weblogic portal code.
I just started. I am having difficulty understanding these 3 annotations below and cannot find some good source / book over the internet.

Could some help explain what these annotations are doing in my code and where can i get some more useful information / books.

@ResourceMapping(value = "getPaymentInfo")
@ModelAttribute("user")
@ActionMapping(params = "action=associateAccount")

Thanks
Neo

[Ashish Sarin]

Hi Neo,

You can refer to some of the articles posted at DZone to get a better understanding of these annotations. Portlets in Action has 2 chapters (7 and 8) dedicated to using Spring Portlet MVC, which can help you get a more detailed understanding of these annotations.

@ResourceMapping - identifies a method responsible for serving resources
@ActionMapping - identifies a method responsible for processing action requests
@ModelAttribue - specifies the name of the model attribute, which you might represent reference data or data that needs to be stored in handler's conversational session

regards
ashish

[Leonard Damien]

Thanks for the reply Ashish.
I will take help from where you have pointed to.

Could someone tell me the primary difference between these 2 annotations.
I mean, couldn't an actionmapping be used to serve resources.

Thanks

@ResourceMapping - identifies a method responsible for serving resources
@ActionMapping - identifies a method responsible for processing action requests

[Ashish Sarin]

To understand the difference you need to look at the resource serving and action processing phases in portlet lifecycle. The resource serving phase is meant for serving resources (like downloading files) and handling AJAX requests.

[Ashish Sarin]

I have posted figures on my blog which show action, render and resource lifecycle phases of portlets. You can look here: http://portlets-in-action.blogspot.com/

Hope this helps.

regards
ashish