Liferay Portlet: Form Actions

[Anthony Fernandez]

Hi! I am an absolute beginner so please excuse my ignorance on a lot of stuff.

I am having a problem when it comes to developing a simple webform in liferay. I was trying to create it normally as in HTML. I put a normal file URL in the action attribute of the form tag. As you may have guessed it did not work at all. So I did a little searching and found out that you have to use

<portlet:actionURL>

tag in the action attribute of the form. What I am not understanding is where do you put the actual URL of the file in there?
This is what I have so far...

<form name="<portlet:namespace />queryform" action="<portlet:actionURL />" method="POST">
    Account number:<input autofocus="autofocus" required="required" type="text" name="<portlet:namespace />accno1" size="3" maxlength="2"/>
    -<input required="required" type="text" name="<portlet:namespace />accno2" size="7" maxlength="5"/><br/>
    <input type="submit" value="OK"/>
</form>

Where do you put the URL? How do you do this?

Thanks for any response.

[Zandis Murāns]

Can you please explain bit more what do you mean by "Where do you put the URL?"?

[Anthony Fernandez]

I mean.... I don't have an idea how the "actionURL" works. Normally in the form tag, you put a file URL in the action attribute. But convention in portlets dictates I use the actionURL, instead. I'm sorry if I'm too ignorant of this, but have a difficulty understanding Java Web development (newbie programmer). Particularly on Liferay portlets.

[Zandis Murāns]

Basicly, what tag "<portlet:actionURL />" do is - it prints out url for you'r portlet actions target.

You can go and test this in this way:

<%@ taglib prefix="portlet" uri="http://java.sun.com/portlet" %>
URL to the action's target is: <portlet:actionURL />

[Anthony Fernandez]

But where does the URL come from?

[Zandis Murāns]

It comes from portlet API.

[Anthony Fernandez]

Oh... So in this case. It's from my "query.java" file? "query" is the name of my project.

So based on what I understand so far... it's supposed to be in the processAction?
The files I am modifying are the following:
- query_view.jsp - Automatically created. The view file.
- query.jsp - Created by me. This is what I want to be in the action attribute.
- query.java - Automatically created. This is where I saw the processAction.

I was trying to go for a simple user input webform that will go to my database.