How do I get information from a servlet into a portlet in JBoss Portal 2.5.4

I have a portal built on JBoss Portal 2.5.4 that needs to have some I18N. On the login.jsp page (which is in portal-server.war), we added a language switch. One of the links on the page is to the Forget Password facility.

For reasons related to look-and-feel, the ForgetPassword page is implemented as a maximized portlet inside our JBoss Portal. But, obviously, there's no user object yet, since there hasn't been a login.

So how do I pass the locale information that the user selects on the login.jsp down into the Forget Password jsp?

I've tried:

session variables (no go, they don't cross over the wars)
cookies (JBoss Portal swallows them)
URL parameters (JBoss Portal swallows them too)
System.setProperty() - by the time they get to the ForgetPassword jsp, they're reset.

This is all running on Windows Vista or 2003.

Is there some obvious technique I'm missing? Do I just need to bite the bullet and reorganize my ForgetPassword page as a servlet so I can get URL parameters?

Solution

Ok, I found one mechanism to do this - create a new portlet window (ForgotPasswordWindow_de) in portal-object.xml:

<window>
    <window-name>ForgotPasswordWindow_de</window-name>
    <instance-ref>UserMgmtPortletInstance_de</instance-ref>
    <region>center</region>
<height>0</height>
</window>

which points to a new portlet instance (UserMgmtPortletInstance_de) in portlet-instances.xml, which pointed to the same Portlet, with a lang preference defined.

<deployments>
   <deployment>
        <instance>
           <instance-id>UserMgmtPortletInstance</instance-id>
           <portlet-ref>UserMgmtPortlet</portlet-ref>
           <preferences>
            <preference>
                <name>lang</name>
                <value>en</value>
                <read-only>true</read-only>
            </preference>
           </preferences>
          <security-constraint>
              <policy-permission>     
                <unchecked/>                
                 <action-name>view</action-name>
              </policy-permission>
           </security-constraint>
        </instance>
   </deployment>
   <!-- add new deployment for UserMgmtPortletInstance_de -->
   <deployment>
        <instance>
           <instance-id>UserMgmtPortletInstance_de</instance-id>
           <portlet-ref>UserMgmtPortlet</portlet-ref>
           <preferences>
            <preference>
                <name>lang</name>
                <value>de</value>
                <read-only>true</read-only>
            </preference>
           </preferences>
          <security-constraint>
              <policy-permission>     
                <unchecked/>                
                 <action-name>view</action-name>
              </policy-permission>
           </security-constraint>
        </instance>
   </deployment>
</deployments>

Then, in the Portlet doView() code, I find this preference, and set an attribute.

    String lang = request.getPreferences().getValue("lang", null);

    request.setAttribute("lang", lang);

Then, in the jsp, I look at the attribute, and set the locale.

String locale = (String) request.getAttribute("lang");

And to kick it all off, the login page has a switch, and if the language is german, it calls ForgotPasswordWindow_de instead of ForgotPasswordWindow_en