LDN - Luminis Developer Network

The Call for Presentations for CBUC 2011 is still open and we are looking forward to receiving more proposals.  If you have an idea for a presentation topic, please submit your proposal via the website, www1.carleton.ca/cbuc2011/presenters/submit-a-proposal/. The deadline for presentation proposals is Friday, May 27th

We have had some suggestions regarding content for presentations, and are looking for topics such as:

• Prospective student contact, and other processes during student recruitment

If a Kirby was in a canoe would he drink a corona?

This announcement channel combines the campus and personal (targeted, group, course) announcements for a user into one channel. The advantage here is the ability to conserve real estate on a tab vs the out of the box Luminis offering of two seperate channels that distinguish between campus and personal announcements. In addition by selecting an announcement, the announcement is displayed to the user without the need of leaving the tab they are currently on. This latest incarnation of the announcement channel makes use of AJAX to communicate with the announcement servlet in the background to obtain the list of announcements, the details of the announcements, as well as periodically refresh the list of announcements.

Years ago I had posted some of our Java classes on here so that as we release new channels, servlets, etc that make use of these utilties you all had one place to go to obtain them. Unforuantely I have not kept them up to date, and as this was prior to Jonathan adding SVN support I have decided to start fresh.

We are in the process of implementing a new Identity Management system. As such this is always a good time to review one's policies and propose changes to them. As such I am curious to know how your institution generates computer ids (these ids would be the ones you use to log into e-mail, or Novell) as well as any problems you have ran into with that format.

I have often been disappointed in how the typical custom channel is handled within Luminis. Well the server is chugging away at obtaining the content for display it is holding up the rendering of the tab that they channel is on.

As such I have over the past many months looked at ways that I could develop channels that were more dynamic. The channel would quickly come up and then fetch the required data to display to the user.

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.