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Portal

Portal 2.2 Administrators Guide

Table of Contents

Login as Portal Administrator

After you install the caGrid Portal, the default administrative user is called portaladmin. The password of this user is determined during installation. See the installation guide for details.

To log in as the default administrative user, portaladmin, go 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.

The following screen appears.

Portal Admin Login Page

In the Login field, enter portaladmin@cabig.nci.nih.gov. In the Password field, enter the password for this user. Click Sign In. The following page appears.

NOTE: If you have previously created another administrative user account (as described here), you can use that username and password to log in as an administrative user.

Portal Admin's Private Page

From this page, you can perform all Liferay administrative operations. The Liferay administrative guide is available here.

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 (that is, 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:

  1. Select the Register tab and enter the required information. You now have a caGrid account but need to log in at least once to create a caGrid Portal account.
  2. Select the Home tab and then click the Login link. Enter your username and password and then click the Login button. A greeting appears.
  3. Click the Logout link. You have a caGrid Portal account. Now you must assign administrative privileges to this account.

To assign administrative privileges to a caGrid account:

  1. Log in as the Portal administrator as described here.
  2. Scroll down the page to the Enterprise Admin portlet.
  3. Select the Roles tab. Among the roles listed there is Administrator.
  4. At the far right of this row, place your mouse over the center icon. The tool tip for this icon displays the text Assign Members. Click this icon. The page shown below appears.
  5. Notice that the Current tab is selected. Select the Available tab. In the Available tab, the account you just created appears. Select the checkbox next to this account and then click Update Associations.
  6. In the drop-down list in the upper-right corner of the page, click the Sign Out link. The caGrid Portal home page appears.
    Adding Members

Editing News Feeds

The caGrid Portal can be used to maintain an RSS news feed. To edit the new feed you must log in to the Portal using an account that has the Administrator role as described here.

To edit news feeds:

  1. After logging in with an Administrator account, go to the News tab. The upper-right corner of the News portlet now shows several controls.
  2. Click the third tool from the left, which has a tool tip with the text Preferences.
  3. Click the Add Channel link. The New Channel page appears.
  4. 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.
  5. Click the Save button.
  6. Click the Edit News Items link.
  7. Click the Add item link. A page appears in which you can enter the title, link, width, height, and description of the news item.
    Admin Controls
    Add News Item

Banning and Unbanning Services

Services can be banned by the Portal administrator. When a service is banned, users cannot discover it in the Portal. There may be cases where banned services eventually come back on-line; in other words, become unbanned. In such cases, the Portal continues 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 contact the Portal administrator to request that the service be unbanned.

Administrative User Interface

In caGrid Portal 2.2 there is an administrative UI for banning and unbanning services. You need to log in as an admin user, see here.

To ban or unban a service:

  1. Navigate to the caGrid Portal homepage in a web browser. For example: http://localhost:8080/web/guest/home
  2. Click the Services menu.
  3. In the Discovery portlet, search for the service you want to ban or unban. As an admin user, you will be able to see ALL services, including those that are already banned.
  4. Click the More Details link to see the details of this service
  5. On the details page, click the Ban Service or Unban Service button as appropriate. The service is immediately banned or unbanned.

Note: A banned service can only be unbanned and vice versa. Once you ban a service, the service is immediately hidden in the caGrid Portal. Alternatively, once you unban a service, the service is immediately visible to all Portal users.

Ban Service

Command Line Utility

You can also use a command-line tool to ban or unban a service. To run the tool, you must have access to the cagrid-portal release and the configuration for the target instance.

To unban a service, run the following from the cagrid-portal directory:

ant aggr:ban-mgr -Dtarget.env=<env_name>

The tool prompts you to choose whether to ban or unban the service and then prompts you to enter the service's URL. You can manually ban services by specifying ban as the operation.

ant aggr:ban-mgr -Dtarget.env=<env_name>

Deleting User Accounts

The caGrid Portal requires that user accounts be associated with only 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 notes that an account already exists with that email address, and indicates that the user should either log in with those credentials or contact the administrator to request that the account be deleted.

Deleting user accounts is a two step process. You must first delete the user account in Liferay and then clear the user from the Portal database.

Delete Liferay User

To delete a user account, you must log in to the Portal using an account that has the Administrator role (see Creating the Administrative User on page 5 for details).

Note: If the following message appears: "You do not have the roles required to access this portlet," 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).
    Enterprise Admin: Search User
  • Select the checkbox next to the user's account row, then click the Deactivate button (as shown in Figure 7).
    Enterprise Admin: Deactivate User
  • 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).
    Enterprise Admin: Delete User
  • Select the checkbox next to the account and click the Delete button. You see a success message.

Delete Portal User

While the previous process deletes the Liferay user account, you must 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 prompts you for the user's grid identity. Provide the grid identity of the user that you want to delete from the Portal database. See the following example.

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

The caGrid Portal maintains a list of all cancer centers and institutes participating in caBIG®. This list is uploaded to the Portal database from an Excel spreadsheet when the Portal is first installed. It is possible to update the participant list (in other words, delete old participants and upload new ones), by uploading an updated Excel spreadsheet.

Use the command line utility to update the participants in the caGrid Portal. This utility takes the path to an Excel spreadsheet, parses it, and then uploads the participant data. The default path is for the Excel spreadsheet 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. For more information, see How to Change Target Grids. Run the following command (see Figure 9 below)

ant aggr:load-workspaces -Dtarget.env=nci_dev
Update Participants

Editing the Calendar

The Home page of the caGrid Portal displays a calendar portlet. This is a full-featured calendar application. The calendar contents can be imported and exported using the standard iCalendar format (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2445).

To import iCalendar format files into the caGrid Portal calendar, do the following.

  1. Log in to the Portal using an account that has the Administrator role as described here.
  2. Navigate to the caGrid Portal homepage by going to: http://<host>:<port>. You see an Export/Import tab in the calendar portlet (as shown in Figure 10).
  3. Import an iCalendar format file (as shown in Figure 11). When the import is complete, a success message appears.
    Calendar Portlet
    Calendar Import/Export

Dormant/Banned Services List

Non-admin(default) Portal users can only see Active and Inactive services in the Portal, and services that are Dormant or Banned are filtered out. On the other hand, the Portal admin can see ALL services in the discovery Portlet (http://<portal_url>/discovery).

See details on service statuses in the Portal here
See instructions on how to Login as Portal Admin here.

Refresh Service Metadata

It is possible for the Portal administrator to force the reloading of a service's metadata by the Portal. The following administrative user interface can schedule a reload of the metadata.

Log in to the Portal using an account that has the Administrator role, as described here.

To refresh service metadata:

  1. Navigate to the caGrid Portal homepage in a web browser. For example, http://localhost:8080/web/guest/home.
  2. Click the Services menu.
  3. In the Discovery portlet, search for the service you want to ban or unban. As an administrative user, you can see ALL services, including those that are already banned.
  4. Click the More Details link to see the details of this service.
  5. Click the Reload Metadata button (see Figure 12 below) on the Details page to schedule a metadata reload for the service. The metadata and the domain model, in the case of a data service, is fetched and loaded into the Portal within approximately 30 minutes.
    Reload Metadata
Last edited by
Manav Kher (1528 days ago) , ...
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