/[A3C]/lib/A3C.pod
This is repository of my old source code which isn't updated any more. Go to git.rot13.org for current projects!
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Contents of /lib/A3C.pod

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Revision 207 - (show annotations)
Thu Jun 19 19:52:43 2008 UTC (15 years, 9 months ago) by dpavlin
File size: 5580 byte(s)
describe models and more things to do...
1 =head1 NAME
2
3 A3C = AAAC; AAA from "Authentication, Authorization and Accounting" and C from "CARNet".
4
5 =head1 DESCRIPTION
6
7 This page describes general idea about A3C application and current status of implementation.
8
9 Oppinions should be attributed to Dobrica Pavlinusic, and not other developers :-)
10 It's surposed to convey a story which is coherent enough for new developer
11 to join into project. Most of other documentation is more useful when
12 developing and looking into code usage (if it's not documented and tested,
13 it doesn't exist) but this part is delivered as pure POD for reading pleasure.
14
15 =head1 Models
16
17 Models in Jifty are at perl level objects (with validation and
18 canonicalization) and tables in database.
19
20 For a start, we implement some magic documented in L<A3C::Record> on records
21 (rows in database).
22
23 Then, we need to mungle data without re-thinking SQL queries which would
24 produce same results, so there is L<A3C::SQL> which produce objects that
25 look like L<Jifty::Collection>s, but aren't. This allows us to switch into
26 SQL in views if needed.
27
28 This method is not perfect, and shouldn't be used instead of Jifty models
29 just to write SQL because it doesn't do any permission checking. However,
30 it's a huge help for compex C<GROUP BY> and C<JOIN> queries which are hard
31 to express using L<Jifty::DBI>.
32
33 If we needed to generate those queries from within program (from user data,
34 for example) something like L<Fey::SQL> would be much better tool.
35
36 =head1 LDAP
37
38 Implement LDAP entry and edit interface (insteresting problem since most
39 values can have multiple entries which doesn't map nicely to relational
40 schema)
41
42 This can in turn be broken down into following tasks:
43
44 =head2 Import data from existing LDAP server
45
46 C<bin/import-ldap.pl> has embedded documentation
47
48 =head2 Query existing LDAP server
49
50 Since we are creating local copy of data, we need easy way to ask master
51 LDAP server for data. L<A3C::LDAP> provides way to query LDAP and receive
52 something similar enough to L<Jifty::Collection> so that L<A3C::View>s
53 doesn't have to be edited to switch from Jifty models to LDAP
54 data.
55
56 =head2 Create new entries and edit existing ones
57
58 We are in the middle of migaration from (generic) L<A3C::Model::Person> and
59 L<A3C::Model::Organization> to our custom L<A3C::Model::hrEduOrg> and
60 L<A3C::Model::hrEduPerson>
61
62 Most views I guess, will be implemented by subclassing L<Jifty::View::Declare::CRUD>.
63 Right now L<A3C::View::Organization> is such implementation.
64
65 Planned C<A3C::View::hrEduPerson> will implement another such view, and I
66 hope to see some kind of code reuse there (which should probably move to
67 C<Jifty::Plugin::TableCRUD>.
68
69 =head2 Virtual LDAP server to publish data
70
71 This part is in planning stage, and it will probably be based on L<Net::LDAP::Server>.
72
73 =head1 Existing LDAP schema
74
75 First, we needed a clever way to import existing LDAP schema into Jifty. So,
76 C<bin/ldap2model.pl> helper was created to handle that.
77
78 Some entries in LDAP schema have fixed list of attributed, and L<A3C::AAIEduHr>
79 implements fetcher (with cache) for that data.
80
81 =head1 Legacy portal integration
82
83 =head2 Parse PHP config files
84
85 Configuration files in PHP is only place in which part of portal
86 configuration is specified. To handle it in A3C, we use
87 L<A3C::Model::StrixInstance> which agregates all instance data. Parser is
88 implemented by L<A3C::PHP>
89
90 =head2 Connect to remote database
91
92 Implemented in two different ways:
93
94 =head3 Direct SQL execution
95
96 L<A3C::Action::StrixSQL> and interface as L<A3C::View::Strix/sql>.
97
98 =head3 Fetching data hashes
99
100 C<Strix> (which doesn't link well from on-line documentation so you will
101 have to take a look in C<lib/Strix.pm>) implements pure DBI code (ported
102 from php) to access data directly. Keep in mind that this data have to be
103 cached for any resonable performance. On the other hand, data can be
104 structured usefully, for example trees are structured in useful way for
105 direct output to JSON.
106
107 If tree has C<class> key, it can be set to C<error> so that we can mark
108 errors in data using same CSS class in views. This might be useful convention.
109
110 I prefer to keep this file documented up to level that make it's usage from Jifty and
111 C<t/50-strix.t> makes sanse, but not more than that.
112
113 =head1 HTML
114
115 We don't generate HTML using templates. In fact, all HTML is encoded in perl
116 code using L<Template::Declare>. This allows easy generation of valid HTML,
117 high-level templates which are perl code and easy skinning using CSS.
118
119 C<share/web/static/css/app.css> is used to store application specific CSS.
120 It should probably be split into several files (Jifty will concatenate them
121 for us anyway) for easier maintenance, probably by same logic as view names
122 to skip additional step of mapping when human are watching into code.
123
124 In long run, this should allow us to refactor templates at code level and
125 create different re-usable widgets which brings us to following topic...
126
127 =head1 AJAX
128
129 Jifty's way of AJAX are L<Jifty::Manual::PageRegions>.
130
131 =head2 Strix navigation
132
133 L<http://a3c.skole.hr/strix/navigation>
134
135 For now, we have implementation of two-level select which is in sync with
136 instance clipboard (implemented by L<A3C::Model::StrixInstanceSelection> and
137 L<A3C::View::Strix> and L<A3C::Action::StrixSelectSite>. This is
138 good candidate to refactor into reusable widget on it's own.
139
140 =head1 BUGS
141
142 Many probably, documented in C<TODO> which is also useful for quick overview
143 what changed between versions if svn commit log is too detailed allthough
144 first line of commit message might be good summary of each individual
145 change.

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