Administration
Portal 2.1 Administrators Guide
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Table of Contents |
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Login as Portal Administrator
After the portal is installed, there will be a single default administrative user whose username is 'portaladmin'. The password of this user is determined at installation time. See the installation guide for details.
Login as portaladmin by going to: https://<host>:<secure_port>/user/portaladmin/1
NOTE: Make sure you go to the HTTPS version of this URL. Otherwise, the portaladmin password will be sent in clear text across the network, which is a security risk.
You will be presented with the following screen:
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| Portal Admin Login Page |
In the Login field, enter 'portaladmin@cabig.nci.nih.gov'. In the Password field, enter the password for this user. Then press the Sign In button. You will see the following page.
NOTE: If you have previously created another administrative user accounts (as described here), you can use that username and password to login as an admin user.
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| Portal Admin's Private Page |
From this page, you can perform all Liferay administrative operations. The Liferay administrative guide is here
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Creating the Administrative User
In order to create a caGrid Portal administrative account, we will need valid caGrid credentials. If you already have an account with the NCICB Dorian Identity Provider (IdP), or with the NCICB AuthenticationService IdP (i.e. you have an NIH account), then you do not need to create a new caGrid account. If you don't have either of these accounts, you can create a new caGrid account through the portal.
To create a new account, go to the REGISTER tab, and enter the required information. When you have successfully completed the registration, you will immediately have a caGrid account, but you need to login at least once in order to have a caGrid Portal account. Go to the HOME tab and click the Login link. Enter your username and password and click the Login button. You'll see a greeting. Then click the Logout link.
At this point, we've created a caGrid Portal account. Now we need to give this account administrative privileges. You must now login as the Portal Administrator as described here.
Scroll down the page to the Enterprise Admin portlet. Then select the Roles tab. You should see a list of role names and one of them should be "Adminstrator". All the way to the right of this row will be some icons. When you mouse over the center icon, a tool-tip will display the text "Assign Members". Click on this icon.
Now you should see the following screen:
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| Adding Members |
Notice that the Current tab is selected. Select the Available tab. In the Available tab, you should see the account that you just created. Select the checkbox next to this account and press the Update Associations button.
Now, sign out by select the "Sign Out" link in the "welcome Portal Admin" drop-down list that is in the upper, right-hand corner of the page. You'll be redirected to the caGrid Portal home page.
Editing News Feeds
The caGrid Portal can be used to maintain an RSS news feed. To edit the new feed you will need to login to the portal using an account that has the Administrators role as described here.
After logging in with an Adminstrators account, go to the NEWS tab. In the upper, right-hand corner of the News portlet you'll see the several controls.
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| Admin Controls |
When you mouse of the third icon from the left, you should see a tool-tip that displays the text "Preferences". Click on this icon.
Click the Add Channel link. You'll see the New Channel form. Enter the title, link and description. The link should point to some page that describes the channel. News pages are created and maintained outside of the portal.
Once you've entered this information, press the Save button. An "Edit news items" link will appear below the form. Click on this link. Then click the "Add item" link. A form will appear in which you can enter the title, link, width, height, and description of the news item. Again the link must point to a real web page that contains the content. The width and height values control the dimensions of the IFrame that will display the news item to portal users. You should probably use a width of '100%' and a height of '250px'.
Banning and Un-banning Services
Services can be Banned by the Portal Administrator. That means the service is assigned the state of BANNED and they will no longer be discoverable through the portal. However, there may be cases where banned services eventually come back on line. In such cases, the portal will continue to ignore the service. It is then the responsibility of the service owner to recognize that the service is not being displayed in the portal and then contact the portal administrator to request that the service be un-banned.
Admin UI
In caGrid Portal 2.1 there is an administrative UI for banning and un-banning services. You need to login as an admin user, see here.
Once you are logged in as an admin user, do the following
- Navigate to the caGrid Portal homepage in a web browser. For eg. http://localhost:8080/web/guest/home
- Click on the 'Services' menu
- In the 'Discovery' portlet search for the service you want to ban or un-ban. As an admin user, you will be able to see ALL services, including those that are already banned.
- Click on 'More Details' link to see the details of this service
- On the details page, you will see a button to ban/un-ban this service (as shown in Figure 5). Clicking this service will immediately ban/un-ban this service.
Note- A banned service can only be un-banned and vice versa.
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| Ban Service |
Once you ban/un-ban a service, the service will immediately be hidden in the caGrid Portal. Alternatively, once you un-ban a previously banned service, the service will be immediately visible to all users of the Portal.
Command line Utility
There is also a command-line tool that can be used for this purpose. To run the tool, you must have access to the cagrid-portal release and the configuration for the target instance.
To un-bann a service, run the following from the cagrid-portal directory:
ant aggr:ban-mgr -Dtarget.env=<env_name>
The tool will prompt you for the operation, either ban or unban, and then the URL of the service. Services can be manually banned by specifying ban as the operation.
Deleting User Accounts
The portal requires that user accounts be associated with exactly one email address. However, caGrid users can have multiple sets of grid credentials that are all associated with the same email address. If a user tries to log in with more than one of these sets of credentials, the portal will complain that an account already exists with that email address, and indicate that the user should log in with those credentials instead, or contact the administrator to request that the account be deleted.
Deleting user accounts is a two step process. You will have to delete the user account in Liferay and also clear the user from the Portal database.
Delete Liferay User
To delete a user account, you must go to the portaladmin's private pages. Follow the instructions given in the Creating the Admin User section to log in as portaladmin.
NOTE: If you see messages saying "You do not have the roles required to access this portlet", then you will need to close your browser, re-open it, and try again.
Go to the Users tab of the Enterprise Admin portlet and search for the desired user account (as shown in Figure 6)
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| Enterprise Admin: Search User |
Select the checkbox next to the user's account row, then click the Deactivate button (as shown in Figure 7).
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| Enterprise Admin: Deactivate User |
Then search for the account again, this time selecting No from the Active drop-down list in the advanced search view (as shown in Figure 8).
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| Enterprise Admin: Delete User |
Select the checkbox next to the account and click the Delete button. You will see a success message once you click the 'Delete' button.
Delete Portal User
While the previous process will delete the Liferay user account, we need to also delete the user details from the Portal database. Run the following ant script to delete the account in the Portal
ant -Dtarget.env=nci_dev aggr:delete-user
This will prompt for the users Grid Identity. Provide the grid identity of the user that you want to delete from the Portal database. Example below
aggr:delete-user:
[input] Enter Grid Identitity of User:/O=caBIG/OU=caGrid/OU=LOA1/OU=NCI/CN=userA
[java] AbandonedObjectPool is used (org.apache.commons.dbcp.AbandonedObjectPool@a7c3ef)
[java] LogAbandoned: true
[java] RemoveAbandoned: true
[java] RemoveAbandonedTimeout: 300
[java] Will try and delete user with Grid Identity:/O=caBIG/OU=caGrid/OU=LOA1/OU=NCI/CN=userA
[java] Found User in Database
[java] Successfully deleted User with Grid Identity:/O=caBIG/OU=caGrid/OU=LOA1/OU=NCI/CN=userA
Updating caBIG Participants
caGrid Portal mantains a list of all cancer centers/institutes participating in caBIG. This is uploaded into the Portal database from an Excel sheet when the Portal is first installed. It's possible to update the participant list (delete old participants and upload new ones), by uploading an updated Excel sheet.
There is a command line utility to update the Participants in the caGrid Portal. This utility will take the path to an Excel sheet, parse it, and upload the participant data. The default path is for the excel sheet that is part of the Portal release. To run this tool, you must have access to the cagrid-portal release and the configuration for the target instance. Run the following command (see Figure 9)
ant aggr:load-workspaces -Dtarget.env=nci_dev
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| Update Participants |
Editing the Calendar
The Home page of the caGrid Portal displays a calendar portlet. This is a full featured calendaring application. The calendar contents can be imported and exported using the standard iCal format (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445).
To import ical format files into the caGrid Portal calendar, you must do the following
- Log in with an account that has the Administrators role as described here.
- Navigate to the caGrid Portal homepage by going to: http://<host>:<port>
- You will see an Import/Export tab in the calendar portlet (as shown in figure 10)
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| Calendar Portlet |
- You can then import an ical format file (as shown in Figure 11)
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| Calendar Import/Export |
You will see a success message once you import an ical file.