New Portal Tools On ALUI Toolbox

In my efforts of improving the ALUI/Webcenter portal, and especially enhancing its admin management capabilities, I created over time a set of utilities that I think could be useful to the ALUI/Webcenter community. In one of my previous post, I already talked about the "PT URL Replace" utility (refer to: http://fsanglier.blogspot.com/2008/01/alui-administration-tool-for.html) which was already on the ALUI Toolbox Google code project as a download only. What I did some days ago is updating the ALUI Toolbox Google project (http://code.google.com/p/alui-toolbox/) with the "PT URL Replace" code, as well as a couple of new applications/utilities:

• Portlet Caching Clearer (web portlet - c#)
• Object Identifier (web portlet - c#)
• Web Service Changer (web portlet - c#)
• Page Lister (web portlet - c#)
• ALUI Knowledge Directory Security Agent (java app runnable from console and/or scheduled task such as ALUI jobs) – feature download at http://code.google.com/p/alui-toolbox/
• Improvements for PT URL Replace utility – http://code.google.com/p/alui-toolbox/

All the above apps use the Server API (for Server API introduction, refer to previous posts:) because the tasks performed would not be possible by simply using the IDK. It has been written for ALUI 6.1.x versions and might not work fully on version 6.5 and above without minor changes (because the server API does change between portal releases). When I get the chance, I will update the Google code project with 2 extra branches that follows the more current portal versions.

The code is released under the GPL license (you can find a copy the the GPL license in the root folder of the apps, or go to http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl.html), and off course is provided without any kind of warranty...

I'll go quickly over each of these utilities in order for you to understand why they might be useful.

Portlet Caching Clearer:
In order to maximize performance, each portlet in the portal can have output caching enabled to a particular timeframe. The drawback of such caching mechanism is that the updates performed by content managers are not instantaneously viewable to end users. This portlet that can be added on your "My Page" allows you to clear portlet caching in 3 different ways:

1. Using the portal tree picker, select the portlet(s) you want to clear.
2. Using the portal tree picker, select the "Community Page(s)" whose portlets you want to clear. The utility will find all the portlets currently added to the selected pages, and clear the cache for each of them.
3. Using the portal tree picker, select the "Community(ies)" you want to clear. The utility will find all the portlets currently added to the selected pages of the selected communities, and clear the cache for each of them.

That way the content managers can easily clear caching for a set of pages, communities, or portlets...

Object Identifier:

Let's say that you have a portlet application that identify a portal object in its config file by its UUID (or its ID for that matter)...Now let's say you come back to that portlet 6 month later because you need to perform an improvement and/or fix something...Unless you clearly documented what object corresponds to this ID/UUID (and where it is in the portal), it will not be easy to find it (unless you can easily run a DB query...). This portlet basically answer that needs:

• Provide a UUID and it will tell you the corresponding Classid/ObjectID pair + Object Name + Object Location in the Portal Admin Hierarchy.
• Provide a Classid/ObjectID pair, and it will tell you the corresponding UUID + Object Name + Object Location in the Portal Admin Hierarchy.
  

Web Service Changer:

Have you ever noticed that you cannot change the webservice attached to a portlet once you initially picked it and created the portlet? Now let's say that you have a bunch of publisher portlets that are all tied to the same "Publish Content Web Service" object. But all a sudden, you change your mind and decide to have some portlets that should be tied to 2 different "Publish Content Web Service" objects, each one with a different caching timeframe (i.e. a long caching for the content that hardly change, and a shorter caching for the content that changes often). In the portal out of the box, you cannot do that easily, and will probably have to recreate all the portlets and re-attach them to the same publisher content etc...(big pain).

Well this portlet allows you to easily change the "portlet web service" OR the "portlet template" attached to a particular portlet or group of portlets:

• Using the portal tree picker, pick the portlet you want to change.
• Using the portal tree picker, pick the web service OR portlet template that you want these portlet to be assigned to.
• Click Submit...Done.

Page Lister:

This simple utility allows to display as a list of HTML links (simple <a href=""></a> tags) all the Community Pages in the portal that a certain users have access to...

Why doing this? it is a simple way of creating a Sitemap that a web "crawler" (either ALUI web crawler, or Google appliance etc...) could hit in order to be dynamically aware of all the ALUI pages of your site that are accessible to the guest users for example...Or that could also be used as a security monitoring tool in order to verify which pages are accessible to a particular user (i.e. Guest) and ensure it is not a security mistake etc...

ALUI Knowledge Directory Security Agent:

This utility, written in java (we have to think about our linux/unix user base too :) ), was created as a scheduled task agent in order to act as a security cop in the knowledge directory. What it does is go through all the KD folders the agent user has access to, and automatically assign the found cards with their parent folder security.

All you need to provide are:

1. KD folder ID to start with,
2. A user ID / password (or session token if you run as a portal "external operation") the agent should impersonate with,
3. (Optional) CrawlerIDs (if you want to change only the cards that were brought into KD by a specific set of crawlers)

2 main use cases I see for this tool:

• Use it as a "cop" background schedule job in order to ensure the security on the cards is always right, based on the security of the folder.
• In the event you use a single crawler with various filters that organize your content in various folders. Without this agent, the crawled cards will get the security defined in the crawler's "crawled content permission" section...and that might not be in phase with the security of the various KD folders the content will be organized into (due to filters). If you run this cop security agent after each crawl, then you are all set based on the destination folder, not on the crawler's "crawled content permission" section...

That's it for now. I hope you'll test them out and let me know if you think these are useful or not.
Don’t hesitate to give ideas and/or wish lists of things which would be good to have in the portal...and don't hesitate to share the cool utilities you've done too

I or others will be updating the project every so often so keep informed or you might miss out on some good resources :)