ESciDoc Admin

Overview

eSciDoc admin is a a solution for the management of master data in an installation of the eSciDoc core services. Currently it is implemented as TurboGears web application talking to the core services REST interfaces.

It implements (parts of) the use cases specified in

• PubMan_Func_Spec_Organizational_Unit_Management
• PubMan_Func_Spec_Collection_Administration
• PubMan_Func_Spec_User_Management

Repository URL: https://subversion1.escidoc.mpg.de/admin/

Installation/Deployment

Requirements

• Python (>= 2.4),
• TurboGears (>= 1.0.1) (see http://docs.turbogears.org/1.0/Install for details),
• SQLAlchemy (0.3.x) (install with easy_install),
• it may be necessary to upgrade to a newer version of pysqlite,
• httplib2

Download

You may download the application as egg appropriate for your architecture:

TODO

Or run eSciDoc admin from a repository checkout: run

 svn co https://subversion1.escidoc.mpg.de/admin/trunk/escidocadmin

in a suitable directory.

Deployment

Configuration

You need to supply some basic configuration settings for the application by adding the following lines to the global section of the configuration file.

Configure the core services instance to which to talk

 framework.host="host[:port]"

and a default user account to use

 framework.user="username"
 framework.password="password"

When deploying the web application behind a proxy (e.g. apache), make sure to set

 server.webpath="http://your.domain/escidoc/admin/path/"

Controlling the Application

You may use the start-escidocadmin.py script to start the application from the commandline.

Running eSciDoc admin behind Apache HTTPD

To run eSciDoc admin behind Apache HTTPD add the following to your apache configuration:

 RewriteRule ^/escidoc/admin/path/(.*) http://127.0.0.1:8080/$1 [proxy,L]
 <Location /escidoc/admin/path>
   Order allow,deny
   Allow from all
 </Location>

Technical Documentation

Overview

eSciDoc admin manages resources of the following kinds:

• Organizational Units, abbreviated ou,
• Contexts, abbreviated ctx,
• User Accounts (and Grants), subsumed under aa (for authentication and authorization).

Architecture

eSciDoc admin - as a web interface to the resource handler services that support resource CRUD operations - has a very simple architecture:

• All communication with the core services resource handlers is implemented in a core services client library
• As a !TurboGears aplication, escidocadmin subscribes to the MVC pattern, or better the VC pattern, because the persistence layer is implemented by the framework.
• The management logic for each resource is implemented in one controller class.
• The views for each resource are implemented in one (or several) templates.

Core services Client Library

The core services client library provides a client class which mediates access to a core services installation much like a database connection mediates access to a database.

Since resources are transferred between core service resource handlers and clients as xml representations, the client library treats resources basically as (wrapped) xml dom objects (more precisely as etree.Element instances). A Resource instance is initialized with an appropriate Element of a parsed core service resource handler response, and can be serialized for passing it back to the core service resource handler.

User Management

eSciDoc admin uses eSciDoc user accounts to access the core services resource handlers. After successful authentication with the external identity provider the admin application receives a token which is subsequently used to authenticate requests to the core service resource handlers (see login_finish).

Enhanced Scientific Documentation

Representational State Transfer

Uniform Resource Locator

Open Source and Most Widely Used Web Server

Hypertext Transfer Protocol Daemon

Create, Retrieve, Update and Delete

Model View Controller