My application needs to know if it is running as a portlet.

MyFaces has a static utility class that can let your application know if it is running as a portlet or not. This class is org.apache.myfaces.portlet.PortletUtil. It has two static methods:

public static boolean isRenderResponse(FacesContext facesContext)
public static boolean isPortletRequest(FacesContext facesContext)

You will probably never use isRenderResponse(). It is used by the MyFaces implementation.

isPortletRequest() simply checks for the existence of a flag that is set by MyFacesGenericPortlet. It does not use any portlet api for this so you don't need the portlet jar in your classpath if you are just running as a servlet.

A common use case for PortletUtil will be to enable or disable a JSF component based on whether or not you are running in a portlet. To do this, you will wrap the PortletUtil in a managed bean that is placed in application scope. The following example assumes that you want to display some text only in a portlet environment:

First, create the wrapper bean

import javax.faces.context.FacesContext;

import org.apache.myfaces.portlet.PortletUtil;

public class PortletUtilBean {

    public boolean isPortletRequest() {
        FacesContext facesContext = FacesContext.getCurrentInstance();
        return PortletUtil.isPortletRequest(facesContext);
    }
}

Then, register it in faces-config.xml

<managed-bean>
        <managed-bean-name>PortletUtilBean</managed-bean-name>
        <managed-bean-class>com.foo.mybean.PortletUtilBean</managed-bean-class>
        <managed-bean-scope>application</managed-bean-scope>
</managed-bean>

Then, use the managed bean as a binding in the rendered attribute of your JSF component

<h:outputText escape="true" rendered="#{PortletUtilBean.portletRequest}" style="color: Red;" 
                    value="This text will only appear in portlets." />
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