Prospectus Editing Tool (PET)

IT Services R&D / ILRT

Using emerging learning and research technologies to enable excellence

Prospectus Editing Tool (PET)

Mike Jones ([email protected])

IT Services R&D / ILRT

Overview

• The drivers and opportunities of the Prospectus project

• The rationale for developing PET

• How we use the TERMINALFOUR Site Manager API in PET

• The pros and cons of our approach

• Experiences of using the TERMINALFOUR Site Manager API

IT Services R&D / ILRT

A workflow-driven web application for collating, editing and approving content for the undergraduate and postgraduate prospectuses.

What is PET?

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Content for Web …

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… and Print …

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… all stored in Site Manager

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We needed to replace old software

http://www.flickr.com/photos/bogdansuditu/2377842887

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Opportunity to review processes

http://www.flickr.com/photos/videolux/2389320345/

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Why develop PET?

• Reluctance to train ~100 academics and faculty staff in using Site Manager for just prospectus content

• Needed to control access to content via roles (Editor, Faculty Reviewer, Print Reviewer and Prospectus Administrator) that didn’t fit with Site Manager roles

• Wanted a robust standards-based workflow engine

• A request for ‘simplified editing screens’

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Architecture

Site ManagerPET

Workflow DB

Custom tag brokers

PET DB CMS DB Data Warehouse

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Core Technology for PET

• Spring Framework (http://spring.io)• Spring MVC• Spring Security

• Activiti BPM Platform (http://www.activiti.org)

• MyBatis (http://github.com/mybatis)

• Ehcache (http://ehcache.org)

• TERMINALFOUR Site Manager API

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Content is abstracted to Domain Objects

• Web application passes around domain model objects that represent people, programmes, faculties, subjects etc

• For Site Manager content an object is made of a Section + Metadata + Content

• Implemented mappings from variables in the Java objects to Site Manager content via custom annotations

• Support a subset of types – plain text, numbers, list (not sub-lists), content links …

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Mapping Content

@SectionIDprivate Integer id;

@ContentIDprivate Integer contentId;

@VersionFieldprivate String version;

@MetadataField(“keywords“)private String keywords;

@ContentField(“UCAS code”)private String ucasCode;

@ContentField(“Award”)private String award;

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Support for the web view

• Validators check withthe CMS for mandatory fields

• Get list values

• Show field names and descriptions (can be overridden)

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Workflow

• Activiti BPM Platform

• Support BMN 2.0

• Design the workflowwith an Eclipse plugin

• Java and a REST API

• Supports different tasks – Email, Script, Business Rule etc

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Progress

• Still a work in progress

• Currently being used by Undergraduate Recruitment

• Soon to be released to Postgraduate Recruitment

• Undergraduate prospectus will be published in February 2014 (I still need to write some Custom Brokers)

• Positive feedback from academics. Student Recruitment positive but have lots of suggestions for improvement.

IT Services R&D / ILRT

Pros and cons of our approach

• Flexible system that can adapt to the needs of Student Recruitment

• Benefit from the advantages of Site Manager while providing an easy-to-use interface for the academics

• Powerful workflow that can be adapted to changing business processes

• BUT … the heavy use of the Site Manager API means we cannot update our CMS until PET is fully tested against new versions of Site Manager

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Experiences of using the Site Manager API

• We have used the API for:

• The development of PET

• The migration of Plone content to Site Manager

• Populating users and groups in Site Manager from LDAP

It is very powerful!

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Documentation

http://www.flickr.com/photos/53326337@N00/3820645253

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Should you avoid parts of the API?

http://www.flickr.com/photos/robwatling/5059689668/

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Pass a Connection or a Statement?

• Initially surprised that you deal with JDBC objects directly but we embraced it

• Decided to pass in a Statement rather than a Connection so we can ensure the Statement was closed

• You can’t always pass in a Statement; some API calls query the database but don’t even require a Connection ...

• … which ties you to the SM Connection pool implementation

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Bits and bobs

• More examples needed

• No notes on API changes in the release notes

• Not trivial to setup a development environment – I use maven overlays to make my life easier

• Support for transactions?

• Cache – not able to notify the Site Manager cache that a remote application has added or modified content.

• No support for repository standards – JSR-170 / JSR-283 or CMIS

IT Services R&D / ILRT

Questions?