If you are working at a university or other institution that makes use of the Luminis portal application delivered by Sungard Higher Education and you're wanting to set up a channel that pulls in survey links from Scantron's Class Climate system for students to fill out course evaluations, this recipe is intended for you.

At the U of S we take the XML messages from Banner and rewrite them before handing them off to Luminis.  This is both for LDI extracts and also LDI messages on-the-fly.  This post is not talking about the actual rewriting of the messages, I am concentrating only on how we intercept the LDI messages that are coming across JMS.

Attached is the procedure we use each semester to load term, course, student, enrollment, and assignments from Banner to Luminis. We haven't had students in the portal very long, so I can't say this is tried and true, but it should be a good start. 

A Note about step 7

You know how you can add extra parameters to a channel in the channel creation process ?  Well - that's all well and good if the channel you created cares about those (ie in the JAVA code / .car file etc). 

What if you wanted to ... say - force something, like a special message, a width, assign a style class or something and access that in the XSL (nested-tables.xsl / custom.xsl).

My latest hacking expedition into Luminis 4 forced me to figure this out.

Add A Parameter

The form I am working with has no name (reminds me of a horse ... nevermind, that's a song :) ) .... but the doc says "if the form does not have a name, it will still work within the GCF if there is only one form in the HTML."
Which this is the case.

So, suppose the actual form (when in view source) is something like this:

<table border=0 summary="">
<form method="POST" action="/blah/auth" AutoComplete="off">
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="v" value="v1.4">
<INPUT TYPE="hidden" NAME="sometoken" value="v1.2~B34C0BB1~6C05EF0312234D2CE">

Does anyone have an example of the a:ifblank / notblank and a:check logic in their connectors (as follows)? I can't find one on lumdev currently (after searching for ifblank).
The following info is from the Luminis SDK Generic Connector Framework Implementation Guide Release 4.1 April 2008
The RESULT tag has the following attributes:

We would like to put some of our xml/rss feeds behind authentication. I cannot figure out how to have a Luminis XSLT Transformation channel (nor rss channel) show the contents of a feed, but only through authentication and "SSO" with our gcf connector.
Main objective: the public cannot see the feeds. Only those who provided a correct username/password.

For example, in our development environment one needs a username/password to go here:
http://dev01a.shu.edu/depts/uc/apps/cmcentral.nsf/category.rss?OpenPage&restricttocategory=Parking|General

Hi. We have some xml feeds coming from another server within our university that we display in Luminis using the XML Transformation type of channel.

Today the server that hosts the xml feeds went down ..... so our channels were not able to display.

I know there are caching parameters in portal.properties.
Does anyone know if Luminis 4.x has a way of caching xml/rss on the server (not in the browser) ..... and where on the server would the cached files exist?
If not, we are going to use a home-grown solution.

Thanks.

Introduction

Lets start by saying that L****** and Microsoft Web Access just don't get along. The current working implementation has a few (major) problems:

• The solution uses pickup.response which is VERY insecure
• When using IE, MOWA Light Access Mode is activated (not good)
• When a user clicks on "Log out" from MOWA, it also kills their L****** session (IE only)

We managed to work around all three of these issues, and it is stable enough that I am ready to share it with you nice folks.

Has anyone attempted to use RSS on the Login page? If so, can you recommend any best practices and/or "watch outs?"

I'm open to any suggestions, but as of now our best potential solution is utilizing www.simplepie.org.
It's a PHP utility that simplifies caching, customizing, and parsing RSS. Our only concern is getting PHP to run on our production box.

Thank you,
Joshua Anglero