Besides users and programmers, Tricia supports administrators who wish to configure an application.
Configuration of a Tricia application is done via a web-interface. Access to the web-interface is provided by a dedicated server (i.e. not the same server application hosting the Tricia project), which you must launch from within eclipse using an Ant-Target.
The Ant Target will launch the configuration server and open your browser at the configuration page.
To launch the Web-Configurator for your project:
- Make sure you have the Ant View turned on in Eclipse (Window->Show View->Ant)
- Make sure you have the Ant File 'build.xml' located in the toro plugin project in your Ant View (if not, add it by clicking the +Ant and adding build.xml from the toro plugin project)
- double click the Ant Target 'configure staging' in the Ant View (there are other configuration modes available - see below)
You should now see a web-page allowing you to configure the application:
The filled out blue dots represent Classes containing something
configurable. The hollow grey dots are
properties, which you can actually configure.Click on them, and you can set their values. At the beginning, you will only be able to configure generic properties that are common to all projects, and not self-made
configurables. As an example, you may wish to change the database used by your project to [MySQL].
If you click on 'services', a dropdown menu on the right hand side pops up, letting you also choose self-made classes of type [configurable]. As you will see, all configurable classes of all Tricia projects are offered in this drop down menu. We recommend you only add those that are relevant to your project.
If you click 'Save this Configuration', the settings are saved in a xml file called configuration.xml located in:
[Working Directory]\tricia\properties\configuration.xml
ATTENTION: The configuration.xml in this folder is used for all Tricia projects. If you have several Tricia projects, you should rename the generated configuration.xml file for each project, and 'activate' the correct configuration file by renaming it 'configuration.xml' again when launching that project. Alternatively, you could add all configurable classes with the drop down menu in the configurator, and then save one configuration for all projects. At run-time, a project will ignore all settings that are not relevant to it. If possible, try developing and debugging your application in test mode:
In this run-model, all data is wiped after each startup, and the configuration information is saved in two separate .xml files:
%TRICIA_WORKSPACE%/toro/config/configuration.xml (for the settings of the framework)
%PLUGIN_FOLDER%/config/plugin-config.xml (for the settings of the plugin)
This separation allows you to keep general settings for all projects in once place, and plugin (i.e. your application) specific settings in the corresponding plugin folder.
To configure these separate configuration files launch the following Ant targets instead of the 'configure staging' target:
configure test core
configure test plugin
These configuration files will however only be loaded if you deploy in test-mode.
After finishing up with the configuration, you should click 'Stop the Configurator', to terminate the server running in the background, and automatically close the browser.
See also the following section in the JavaDoc:
Tricia - Printout