LDN - Luminis Developer Network

For some time now it has irritated us that we cannot link directly to content in Luminis. Due to business priorities we never put this in... until now.

Here is the strategy we took. Provide a GET variable that allows the user to specify the channel functional name they want. If the user is logged in and they go to the home page they will either go strait into the portal, or into the page that is specified through the get variable. If they are not logged in, the requested variable is put into a cookie and then parsed once they have logged in.

Here is what I did:

Using SSB we have found that there are a number of in-consistencies in the interface, and while they are functional, not all of the interfaces are usable.

So we came up with a validation solution that you can "Bolt On" to SSB with a minimal package change and gives you the ability to create custom interface bits without customizing the packages.

I'll let the code and examples speak for them selves here:

http://web.uvic.ca/~wolowicz/jsvalidation/

Extending William's Combined Announcement Channel and someone's archive, we added an archive that sorts the announcements based on Month and year. We have had this for some time but, while it works, the code is not my favorite... I'm going to post it anyway and if you want to use it or customize it that's great.

As promised or at least commented on some time ago, I have created a screen cap tutorial for setting up a development environment in Eclipse. This is certainly not the only methodology, but it seems to work for me :)

Try it out and let me know.

• Download and setup
• Unit Testing
• Subversion

As with most institutions, we are currently looking at/implementing Exchange and Sharepoint. I have been tasked to look at the integration and I thought that instead of just bringing the finished product here I would share the whole process and get input from the community on the directions that I'm looking to take.

Cheers
Dave

Here at UVic we have started our Protal implementation before we have completed our banner installation. Because of this, there are some items missing in the standard Luminis/Banner install like LDI, and Banner Student. While we will probably go in this direction in the future, there have been requests for us to provide SSO and linkages between WebCT and Luminis. Here are the features:

• Supports HTTPS
• Stylesheet (xsl) can use any content from the Home Area in WebCT
• Can provide an SSO redirect for linking to the Home Area

Recently we upgraded to Luminis 3.3.3.16, we were quite happy with the newer version as it solved a number of load issues, and seemed to be slightly more stable. I had heard that there were problems with the icons, but after perusing the articles here I discovered that there were a couple different solutions. Once we installed and got everything running however; there was nothing but issues.

We first attempted to use the method described in Jon's 3.3.3 icons post where the xsl file calls getCPInfo(). This worked very well, however, we started to notice that sometimes we received the wrong Icons. I did a little debugging by echoing out the results of getcpInfo():

We use Eclipse for development and we use the compare functionality in Eclipse to process our Luminis customizations for upgrades. When comparing Jar files (like uPortal.jar) eclipse gives you a breakdown of what has changed in each of the files in the archive. This is a great feature, but it would not work for a car or war file. I did a bunch of searching and came up with the following change for comparing Car files structurally.

In the file org.eclipse.jdt.ui_3.2.1.r321_v20060907.jar (or what ever version of org.eclipse.jdt.ui you have) there is a plugin.xml file. In this file you need to add the “car” extension to line 1743 as follows:

Yesterday I did a presentation at CBUC on creating a Luminis development environment for channel. Here is the description:

Learn how to set up a development environment for channel and customization development. To develop and administrate UVic’s custom channels and customizations; UVic uses an environment that includes uPortal, Eclipse, Subversion, and other technologies. This environment allows us to easily package code and modifications for multiple environments from a single platform-independent GUI.

The presentation will cover:

-Setting up Eclipse and the CDK
-Setting up Subversion and your Eclipse projects

There was alot of conversation around time-outs here. Our systems group and security professionals wanted a short time-out. Our functional employees wanted a long time-out.

The solution proposed was to set the time out to something relatively short, but, provide a check box that will allow the user to state whether they are at a secure work station or not.

The attached file below explains how this was done.

I hope this is usefull. We are looking to roll this out in the next few weeks. I'll let you know how it was recieved.