Multiple Admin Access Methods

Information

Interested Parties

Jason Jason, Brad Johnson, Andrew Petro, Cris Holdorph

Resources Available

...

Notes

Tool+Best+Practices

I often think that an Ant task that remotes into a live uPortal instance to
provision it is more sane than an Ant task that itself touches the uPortal
database, taking advantage of the live service stack implemented in the
running portal. But maybe I'm getting greedy. At a minimum, as Cris and
others have noted, anything that you can do from the command line you should
be able to do via the Portal's Web UI. We have a rich layout management,
grouping, and permissions feature set – we can and should leverage this to
provide rich administrative dashboards for uPortal.

I'd also want to be clear that the full best practice stack isn't required
for initially sharing tools – the hacked out Ant task is fine as something
to post and share. I think a lot of what we're going for here is, sure,
you're going to write the one tool flavor that meets your immediate need,
but please factor it in such a way that producing another flavor of it is
easy.

Andrew Petro

1. Write our meaty code to be called from anywhere (CLI, AntTask, GUI,servlet).
   • Throw and chain exceptions when something goes wrong (don't
     return null as an error condition in an API, don't "log and ignore")
2. Write AntTasks to call from ant that give good ant style feedback for missing/incorrect parameters.
3. Write main()s to call from CLI that give good CLI style feedback for missing/incorrect parameters.
4. Consider generating wrapper scripts when building uPortal to call CLI style tools. (probably would need to generate both *.bat and *.sh scripts)

Brad Johnson