Liferay 6 Using Common Service Builder layer Error - BeanLocatorException - BeanLocator has not been set

Question

We are trying to use liferay service builder as a common layer for all our portlets. We have created a separate common portlet project where we are building the service using service.xml This generates a service.jar file for us. We are copying this jar to all portlets WEB-INF/lib dir.

When we run the portlet it throws following error on the logs and Portlet is temporarily unavailable message is displayed on the portlet.

14:43:17,447 ERROR [jsp:154] com.liferay.portal.kernel.bean.BeanLocatorException: BeanLocator has not been set
    at com.liferay.portal.kernel.bean.PortletBeanLocatorUtil.locate(PortletBeanLocatorUtil.java:40)
    at com.cogs.common.service.CourseLocalServiceUtil.getService(CourseLocalServiceUtil.java:223)
    at com.cogs.common.service.CourseLocalServiceUtil.getCoursesCount(CourseLocalServiceUtil.java:187)
    at org.apache.jsp.jsps.course.course_005fview_jsp._jspService(course_005fview_jsp.java:542)
    at org.apache.jasper.runtime.HttpJspBase.service(HttpJspBase.java:70)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServletWrapper.service(JspServletWrapper.java:377)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.serviceJspFile(JspServlet.java:313)
    at org.apache.jasper.servlet.JspServlet.service(JspServlet.java:260)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:290)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:646)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.doInclude(ApplicationDispatcher.java:551)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.include(ApplicationDispatcher.java:488)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:617)
    at javax.servlet.http.HttpServlet.service(HttpServlet.java:717)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.internalDoFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:290)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationFilterChain.doFilter(ApplicationFilterChain.java:206)
    at org.apache.catalina.core.ApplicationDispatcher.invoke(ApplicationDispatcher.java:646)

I am sure that this approach should work seamlessly. But found several people complaining about it on liferay forums, but did not find any solution yet. Please let us know if you found a way to use service builder as a common layer and it worked for you.

We are using maven for building all portlet projects.

Liferay Version is 6.0.5 And we are using Spring Portlet MVC for our portlet development.

Answer 1

You have to build-service AND deploy the (Portlet-Hook) that is required for your current portlet, you can know it by see its name in liferay-plugin-package.properties file as:

required-deployment-contexts=[Portlet-Hook name]