Quickstart Guide

This Quickstart Guide assumes its' reader has a basic level of competence with the Liferay portal. As such it will not cover Liferay management topics such as how to create pages or add or remove portlet applications to a page.

Installation

The Spreadsheet portlet comes in the form of a Web Application Archive. It may be installed by copying to the <liferay-install-path>/deploy folder or via Control Panel > Plugins Installation > Install More Portlets > Upload File.

The portlet expects that a resource named "jdbc/SpreadsheetDBPool" is defined and contains all the attributes required to enable connection to a database for persistent data storage (Please see the Installation Guide for more information).

Creating your first dataset

  1. Add the Spreadsheet portlet to a page (it can be found under the MyOffice24x7 category).
  2. Click the "Preferences" icon (), which can be found under the Portlet Options popup menu in Liferay 6.x.
  3. Next to the (empty) "Current Dataset" drop down, there is a text box where the name of a new dataset is specified. Type "quickstart" and click the "add" button.
  4. Next step is to add columns to this dataset. Type "employee" in the textbox labelled "New Column Name" and choose the "column.type.text" content type for the column from the "Data Type" drop down list. Click the "add" button to the right of the "Data Type" drop down.
  5. Repeat the above step, creating a column named "birthdate" with content type "column.type.datetime".
  6. Change the Data Format of the birthdate column to show only a short UK date format and no time by replacing "yyyy-MMM-dd HH:mm" with "d/m/yyyy" and clicking the "save" button in the corresponding row of the columns list.
  7. Finally click the "Create" button above the list of dataset columns you've just defined.

You have now finished creating a sample dataset for the Spreadsheet portlet. There are more display options which may be altered such as column labels, widths and formats – explore these at your leisure. Click the "Return to full page" link to see the results!

Entering data to your dataset

Entering data via the Spreadsheet portlet is designed to be intuitive. To get started:

  1. Click the "Insert Below" icon () and then the "Edit Row" icon ().
  2. The cursor will be positioned in a text entry field in the first column (in this case the "employee" column) where data can be typed. Type here ‘The Boss'.
  3. Move the cursor over to the right to enter the boss' birthdate - ‘6/5/1961'.
  4. Click the "save" icon ().

Congratulations, you've entered your first row of data in to your spreadsheet dataset! Now feel free to have an explore of some of the other spreadsheet buttons, see what they do.

Common Gotchas

  • You can only modify the properties of a column one at a time (formatting, column label etc.) - when a particular column's properties are saved, and changes made to other columns will be lost (their properties will revert to the state at which they were last saved).
  • Ensure you are completely happy with your column structure before beginning to enter data - actions such as adding or deleting a column require the entire dataset to be deleted and then recreated, meaning all data entered previously will be lost.
  • Datasets are global - they are not restricted to per user or per community.