[Deploying Sakai] 2 separate instances of a tool on a site

Mon Apr 26 14:09:42 PDT 2010

This is a cool tip Zhen!

Perhaps it would be useful for the site owner to be able to define the "Home
Page" for wiki in the UI for wiki somewhere. I don't see anywhere this is
configurable, perhaps on the info page for the home tool woul be a good
place?
[image: Picture 14.png]

If multiple tools for wiki were ever enabled, all it would have to do really
is set this property to be the name of the page title. This would be a
special case for the wiki tool and would probably be a useful feature.

-Matthew

On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 11:33 PM, Zhen Qian <zqian at umich.edu> wrote:

> One of the tools that could benefit from SAK-7209 is Chat, since every Chat
> tool instance has a unique channel-id. A site could have multiple Chat tools
> with different channel ids, and each Chat tool only displays those messages
> inside its own channel.
>
> However, the Wiki tool integrates tightly with User, Site, Realm and
> resources services. It uses site to create a default wiki space into which a
> user adds pages, and uses Realm object for permission wihin the current site
> (http://confluence.sakaiproject.org/display/RWIKI/Home). Its root object
> is always at the site level.
>
> However, you can try the following trick to "disguise" two Rwiki tools:
>
> 1. Add two instances of wiki tools, either from Admin Sites tool or follow
> the steps Matthew mentioned below:
>
> 2. Go to Admin Sites tool (this is not doable in Site Info, nor the "Info"
> page within Wiki itself), locate the tool, and note the following
> parameters:
>
> home-page-friendly-name:
>
> functions.require:
>
>
>
> home-page:
>
> So you could create two pages inside the default Home page. Assign one page
> as the home-page for one Wiki, and assign another to the second Wiki tool.
> You can update the "home-page-friendly-name" attribute, too.
>
> Save. Refresh the tools. Now the two Wikis seem to be "different" then.
>
> Hope this helps.
>
> - Zhen
>
>
>
>
>
> On Thu, 22 Apr 2010 19:47:58 -0400, Matthew Jones <jonespm at umich.edu>
> wrote:
>
> Yea, I'm not sure the idea behind that. I don't think announcement would
> work by default either because the default channel is the siteid. However an
> admin can change the channel id on the page properties for announcements.
>
>  Edit: Site d8069233-4ee8-4071-ac5c-dc06c6abefcc / Page
> 6c41081c-46dc-4fe5-b7c1-8b8375e34672 / Tool
> d8865d8f-6ea5-4a25-907a-9cc7a0f1f538
>  CHANNEL_ID =
> /announcement/channel/d8069233-4ee8-4071-ac5c-dc06c6abefcc/main
>  However the sakai news and web content are special because they have no
> special tables, only the tool page and the associated page properties, this
> allows you to have multiple pages per site with different page properties.
>  Since site<->page<->tool it seems like it wouldn't matter what you used
> as your identifier and it might be better to go all the way down and use the
> page or the tool.
>  But I'm not expert on the inner workings of all of this, it just seems
> like it wouldn't be a problem, even with the site restoration trick you
> mentioned to get things back. The only problem would be all existing rwiki's
> would need a conversion script to fix their realm in the objects, and that's
> something we don't have a great process of handling yet. (though is
> something being worked on for another issue)
>
> On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 7:21 PM, Steve Swinsburg <
> steve.swinsburg at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Interesting, I was always under the impression that tools should always
>> bind to the siteid/userid as the identifier for persisting data, rather than
>> the specific page instance they are on?
>> I know this breaks the ability for multiple instances of some tools (those
>> that don't support multiple parts in them anyway), but data that is then
>> safely persisted to the site. If the site is deleted it can be retrieved by
>> re-creating the site with the same siteid (found in an email, bookmark or
>> logfile), and all data in tools is still there, you just need to readd the
>> tool to the site.
>> If the data for a tool was tied to a page, that would be more difficult to
>> obtain and recreate.
>> For those tools that do support multiples, eg Web Content/News etc, they
>> have limited data (generally a single URL and a title) so associating them
>> with a pageid is probably ok.
>> cheers,
>> Steve
>>
>>  On 23/04/2010, at 8:04 AM, Matthew Jones wrote:
>>
>> The feature that enables this was implemented in
>> http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-7209
>>  <http://jira.sakaiproject.org/browse/SAK-7209>(Allow multiple instances
>> of new tools)
>>  However, only a few tools have been set by default to allow multiple
>> instances. I believe this was because not all tools work correctly and they
>> weren't all tested out with this feature. Unfortunately rwiki is one of
>> these and it uses the siteid as an identifier rather than the page id. So
>> even if you enabled it for multiple tools, the content will still always be
>> the same. I can look into this to see what it would take to change this, but
>> it's probably not trivial.
>>  Anyway, normally to make the change to allow multiple instances (since
>> I'd already typed it up) on a live system all you'd have to do is:
>>  (This is in your tomcat home directory)
>> 1) Edit webapps/sakai-rwiki-tool/tools/sakai.rwiki.xml
>> Add in the configuration for allowMultipleInstances somewhere near the
>> bottom before the
>>  *                *
>>  Then either restart the instance, or just get the tool to redeploy by
>> 'touching' web.xml (in unix or with unxutils [1] in windows).
>>  (Should get tomcat to 'redeploy' rwiki)
>> 2) touch webapps/sakai-rwiki-tool/WEB-INF/web.xml
>>  3) Then you should either update this file in your sakai-rwiki-tool.war
>> (you can just use zip), or if you're building from source, update it there
>> so the change is permanent.
>>  If you did this you'd notice the screenshot below where you can add
>> multiple instance of wiki with different names but they are all identical,
>> and they all will have the same global name which is the site id (
>> /site/590ca56b-c081-4616-bde1-8dbe907d1a30/home). :( I'm guessing it
>> wouldn't be *hard* to change this id to include the page, but it probably
>> would be hard to change it and also retain compatibility with all of the
>> existing wikis with old references.
>>
>> [image: manywiki.jpg]
>>  [1] http://unxutils.sourceforge.net/
>>  On Thu, Apr 22, 2010 at 5:01 PM, Sri Kota <srini07 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> Hello Friends,
>>> I want to have 2 separate instances of the Wiki on the same worksite.
>>>
>>> Currently, when I try to create a "New Tool", it gives me a copy of the
>>> first instance.
>>>
>>> How can I have multiple instances of a tool on the same site?
>>>
>>> Thanks,
>>> Sri
>>>
>>> --
>>> - Sri
>>> Sarvē Janā Sukhinō Bhavantu
>>>
>>>
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