LDN - Luminis Developer Network

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():
<xsl:copy-of select="cpExtension:getCpInfo()//" />

We found that you sometimes received the information from another user. When I asked Sungard about this I got the following response:

We have also verified that the caching issue affects the channel.xsl as you've described. We have since logged the defect with our development group. This is currently being working on at the moment.

I just wish that they specified this in their documentation.

We then attempted to implement their method of extending the Icon_Evaluator class with one of our own. This did not work either. With our own class in there we received caching errors. To this I was told:

Regarding the second method you've tried, we also have modification with how it is intended to work. I will attach a documentation regarding the java file composition. Please note that this requires the November patch for Luminis III.3.3.

We did the upgrade, something we are happy about now after performing some load testing (they have improved some things). We re-implemented their Icon_Evaluator as per their instructions (not in the CDK this time), and it still gave us the same errors (note that there may have been some compilation errors here as I was fidgeting with my libraries).

So what else can I do, but make my own channel, and include it in the nested-tables.xsl with a tag. So this is what this post is about...

UVic's Icons Channel

You can drop this channel in your portal and install it as you would normally install any channel (class: ca.uvic.uportal.channels.UVicIcons.UVicIconEvaluator). Make sure to give it a functional name (ie: UVic-Icons for this example). You can then go into your nested-tables.xsl and remove the line:
<channel fname="org/jasig/portal/channels/cpicons"/>
and replace it with:
<channel fname="UVic-Icons" />

Icons will now show up depending on your roll.

Now the UVic Icons channel does NOT include a lookups to the LDAP to check if services are enabled. We don't really use this so we did not include it. The channel produces the following XML (note: all roles are in lower case):

<data>
<lroles>
<lrole>admin</lrole>
<lrole>student</lrole>
<lrole>employee</lrole>
</lroles>
<username>theuser</username>
</data>


The username field was for debugging. If your handy with the Java though you can edit the channel to get any com.pipeline.bom.Person_3 attributes. Also I think you could go into the database and change the CHAN_APVL_ID setting for the channel to 0 which I believe will remove it from the selectable channels.

In the XSL you can easily change what icons show up for what roles based on the above XML. This means that you no longer need to edit the uPortal.jar as we are bypassing their icon_evaluator all together. This also means that you will have to use this channel at your own discretion.

Cheers
Dave

PS: UVic's Icons are smaller than Sungard's
PPS: Lroles stands for Luminis Roles. We were tired of trying to decipher what people meant in meetings when they talked about roles around the institution.