LDN - Luminis Developer Network

Description

Group Activity

This channel will list all groups and courses a user is a member of. For each group/course if there has been recent activity (defined as activity in the last 7 days) they will be provided with a link that will take them directly to that new content.

Figured as I had not posted anything for a while I might as well post a status type update. During Luminis Idol it was pointed out that the Group/Course Activity channel I created back in 2005 as popular as it was no longer runs nicely. (For those unfamiliar with the premises behind this channel go here http://www.lumdev.net/node/426).

This was most apparent when Michael was able to demonstrate during Idol:

1. His home tab took forever to load
2. The Group/Course Activity channel died with a nice 'Timed out' error

Well making some changes to the email channel (found in $CP_WEBINF/cars/email.car) to have the links take you into Horde/IMP I came across the following XSL extension that sungard has created.

cpExtension:formURL(aString)

What this does is create a URL on the Luminis server. You pass it the path to the file/script/image/etc and it will but in the appropriate http://servername/ piece at the start. The path you include needs to start from the root of the server, so no relative pathing.

We have just written generic CPIP connectors for most of our web based resources. Recently I have encountered a number of applications that are storing the value of the remote_host or remote_addr in the cookie and then encrypting it to help deter cookie hijacking.

This causes me a problem as the IP/HOST information presented to the remote server is my CPIP server and not the user's machine. So that when my CPIP servlet consumes the cookie and passes it on to the user prior to redirection the user does not get to use the remote site as their cookie is not valid.

Like many other schools we have a demo account for our Luminis implementation. Not wishing to have people use the account to send out spam I arranged with our mail administrator to not have a mailbox created for this userid (we use external mail and authentication). This effectively prevents the user from using the e-mail channel or e-mail icon after logging into JUMP.

Has anyone been able to pass to a CPIP server the user's User-Agent and IP address?

One of our external systems records these two details when a user is authenticated to help prevent session hijacking. If I could access this information from within the CPIP servlet I could forward it on to the external system as an override to the browser values.

We have our CPIP server setup on the same box as Luminis but running on a different port. We are using Java to write the code and for the most part are using the code as shown in the CPIP.pdf document from the Luminis PLatform Security SDK.

I am still working at implementing a new look for our portal. As of this post I have manged to complete changes to the header and tab section of the various calendar windows used within Luminis.

There has been talk recently about the uPortal parameter uP_save=all which is present in Luminis 3. This parameter will save the current uPortal session state to the database so that the user will see that state when they next log in.

Recently both Jon and I have brought news of uPortal URLS that allow you to change settings with in Luminis. (See Change the skin being used for the current session and Minimize Channel State Available ?!?!??? for details). Jon's discovery of the save feature is by far the nicest one, however as pointed out you can not change something in the layout (skin, channel minimized state) and do the uP_save=all at the same time.

Given recent discoveries I have become interessted in how channels are stored in the database. If any of you have looked closely at the data each channel has during rendering you would see there are two types of channel_ids offered.

One is of the form n61(a user added channel), the other looks like u52|1n5(a default channel).