LDN - Luminis Developer Network

Some people may be interested in implementing the Classifieds channel by Iowa State University listed in the uPortal Clearinghouse in their uPortal installations. I spent some time emailing with Mark Boyd of SunGardSCT until I got this working. I figured I could share with everyone how to do this so he is no longer bugged about it and we can all use it. (Additionally I convinced him to join LDN)

This great channel was something that we really wanted to add to our portal as a value added service that helps add more to the community feel of the portal. Unfortunately, on my first attempt with this channel, I was following the instructions using ant and all that complexity. Them I was pointed at the uPortal channel ARchives site which has classifieds in CAR format. This is FAR easier to implement. Additionally, this site has a great overall description of how CARs work and why they are so dang sweet.

In a perfect world, you should be able to download this CAR and drop it into $CP_ROOT/webapps/luminis/WEB-INF/cars and restart the portal. If you are on the latest patch of Luminis III.2, it will create the database tables and add the classifieds channel to your list of available channels when the portal starts up. This did not work for me, but I would suggest trying it, I'm likely a few patches behind the most current.

At this point, I can describe how I made this work without the autopublish and table creation.

1. Put CAR in $CP_ROOT/pipeline/webapps/luminis/WEB-INF/cars
2. Create and populate DB tables (ex for Oracle)
 
 CREATE TABLE CLASSIFIEDS_ADS
 (
  POSTED       DATE,
  ID           INTEGER,
  CATEGORY     VARCHAR2(20 BYTE),
  TITLE        VARCHAR2(30 BYTE),
  DESCRIPTION  VARCHAR2(150 BYTE),
  USERID       INTEGER,
  CONTACT      VARCHAR2(30 BYTE),
  PRICE        VARCHAR2(10 BYTE),
  EXPIRES      DATE,
  APPROVED     VARCHAR2(1 BYTE),
  URL          VARCHAR2(100 BYTE)
 );
 
 ALTER TABLE CLASSIFIEDS_ADS ADD (
  CONSTRAINT PK_CLASSIFIEDS_ADS PRIMARY KEY (ID));

 CREATE TABLE CLASSIFIEDS_CATEGORIES
 (
   NAME  VARCHAR2(20 BYTE)
 );

3. Put some categories in CLASSIFIEDS_CATEGORIES table
4. Restart portal
5. Add a custom channel (you can modify many of these to be more specific to what you want)
   
  a. Enter the following Channel Information:

    Type = Custom
    Title = Classifieds
    Name = Classifieds
    Functional Name = edu.iastate.ait.channels.classifieds.CClassifieds
    Description = Banner A channel to display classified ads.
    Channel Timeout = 10000
    Channel Secure = unchecked
    Channel Class = edu.iastate.ait.channels.classifieds.CClassifieds


  b. Specify the following channel parameters: 

    date.format = dd-MMM-yyyy <this is the format the DB expects, try as we might we can't get a timestamp part in here, insight on this appreciated>
    adFormat = MM/dd/yy <this shows in the channel>
    approveAds = false <put approve true if you want to screen these>
    policyURL = <URL to where your usage policy is, if ommitted won't show link>
    expireTime = <When you want events to be expired> (Note: I am not certain how this on works out)
    Example: 10:30:00
    expireIP = <The numeric value of the server IP that will do the expiring> (Note: I'm not certain about how this one work out either)
    Example: 129.186.100.50


  c. Specify the following channel controls:
    Has Edit = unchecked
    Has About = checked
    Has Help = checked
    

  d. Select the Channel Category "Application" 
  e. Select groups = "Public" 
  f. Add to your layout and enjoy!

The only thing still not working for me is the contact email field being properly populated. If anyone spends some time fighting with this and gets it to grab appropriate values from the LDAP, let me know and I'll update these intructions. From what I can tell you should be able to extract the car with 'jar xvf classifieds.car' then edit ClassifiedsState.java. It is getting this attribute with the code `person.getAttribute("mail")` The person object is an IPerson object. I'm not certain how those work, but I'm sure there is a much better java programmer who will know a super easy fix for this.

I hope this will be helpful.