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uP3 Day 4: PersonDirectory & Portlet Publishing

Faizan got PersonDirectory working — after several updates and IRC exchanges with Eric. So uP3 now hits Rutgers LDAP to retrieve a mapping of our person attributes. Hard to test since the Portlet spec makes you explicitly declare the user attributes a portlet recieves. Probably privacy friendly, though writing a “show me all the attibutes” portlet is harder. Hmm… webproxy a JSP that calls the PersonDirectory service directly?

Published a couple of sample portlets (again after much wrangling with the provided UI and an interchange with Eric). The Pluto/Portlet view of the Universe makes sense in a convoluted manner, but probably needs to be hidden more closely from the user and maybe even administrator. It seems like administrator roles should be separate enough that they get a dropdown list of the deployed “portlet applications” and just deal straightaway with defining subscribe-able portlets. That and clicking on hyperlinks to do stuff/submit forms feels very odd to me and took a while to get.

No layout publishing or export tools, so going to have to add a bunch of entries to data.xml to start building the layouts. Relatively straightforward, though all the CDATA involved with getting the Layout XML documents to embed nicely within other another data.xml document is pretty ugly. Maybe those tags in the XML aren’t so nice afterall.

So… 2 experience uPortal devs and 4 days later we have uP3 hooked up to our DB, LDAP, and some work done migrating one or 2 of our existing webproxy/RSS channels. No CAS integration (or external user management hookups) yet — have a feeling we’re probably going to need to ask for help from Peter to get a handle around how he has his ACEGI configs setup.