Redirecting from the doView method in a portlet

Question

I'm using Websphere portal 6.0 and I'm wondering if there's a way in which I can tell the server which page to render from the doView method. I know I can do it from the processAction method but unfortunately the semantics of the problem don't allow it.

Thank you for your help

Answer 1

I doubt it is possible to send a redirect in doView(). Two reasons for that:

• For performance and various other reasons, the portal may call doView() after the headers of portal's HTTP response were generated and sent out - thus too late to issue a redirect.
• It could be pretty "evil" to be able to do that - a portlet's doView() can be called anytime by the portal, without user's interaction with that portlet. Thus a portlet could do the redirect after a random page refresh, or interaction with another portlet.

In general, I'd say if portlet needs to do a redirect in doView, then it may require a redesign. Perhaps try to describe your problem in more details.

Answer 2

As I understand, you want to decide which JSP/HTML page you are going to show to the user.

In that case, this is what you need to do.

public void doView(RenderRequest req, RenderResponse res) throws IOException,
PortletException {

    PortletRequestDispatcher prd =
        getPortletContext().getRequestDispatcher("/WEB-INF/jsp/view.jsp");
    prd.include(req, res);
}

You can decide each time which jsp you want to obtain the request dispatcher for.