 | Provisional Tool Release Documentation The information below is reproduced from that available in the Sakai 2.1 release (see Provisional Tools). It is posted here for comment and peer review, and suggested changes may be folded into the official documents available on the release site. |
A provisional tool is one which is considered to be mature enough to be included in the release distribution, but is not (yet) considered to be an official part of the enterprise bundle, and which does not come enabled by default. Additional manual steps are required to enable these additional tools, per the discretion of the deploying institutions or individuals.
The basic idea of a provisional release is to allow sites to test these new capabilities for a release before promoting them to be part of the official release. Your feedback on the suitability of these tools for inclusion in an upcoming Sakai release is an important part of this process.
You are encouraged to use these tools taking careful care to test them in your environment and with your users. Some of the tools can be partially enabled to give you a way to roll out the tools to a subset of the users on your system.
| Disabled vs. "Stealth" tools Tools can be hidden from the possibility of being added to a site by the site manager (e.g. by using the "Worksite Setup" tool), and this can be accomplished in two different ways. The first method involves editing an XML file in the source, and requires a new build of the code, while the second method is handled through a setting in sakai.properties, and requires only a restart of Tomcat to take effect (rather than a new build). e.g., in sakai.properties: # STEALTH TOOLS. A stealth tool is a tool that is running in Sakai, but which is nevertheless not available to be added # to a site in Worksite Setup (it can however still be added through the Admin "Sites" tool). # List any tools to be stealthed, using their tool ids, in a comma-separated string (no spaces). # In this example, the rwiki tool, su tool, roster tool, and the assignment tool w/o grading are stealthed: # stealthTools@org.sakaiproject.api.kernel.tool.ActiveToolManager=sakai.rwiki,sakai.su,sakai.site.roster,sakai.assignment It's important to note - especially in the context of provisional tools - that "unstealthing" a tool will not make it visible if the tool XML file is not already set appropriately. Unstealthing a tool, in other words, is not a sufficient method for enabling provisional tools. |
Comments (2)
Mar 10, 2006
Brian Jorgensen says:
Clay: here is a stab at an explanation of stealthTools to follow the third parag...Clay: here is a stab at an explanation of stealthTools to follow the third paragraph or maybe the list
; hope I understood the main concepts. Not sure if the last line is a good idea or not.
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This "partial enablement" is achieved with the Sakai stealthTools feature, which sets tools as being available for the admin user to add to any site without being available to other users to add to their sites.
In the 2.1.1 release, Rwiki, SU, and Roster are configured by default as stealthTools; in order to change which tools are stealthTools, this configuration must be overriden in sakai.properties. For example,
stealthTools@org.sakaiproject.api.kernel.tool.ActiveToolManager=sakai.su,sakai.site.roster
in sakai.properties will retain SU and Roster as stealthTools, while making Rwiki available to all users to add to their sites (assuming that the other Rwiki configurations are correct; see below).
For complete documentation on stealthTools, please see <where?>.
Mar 11, 2006
Clay Fenlason says:
Cool, thanks. I think I've captured the idea you're expressing above. There isn'...Cool, thanks. I think I've captured the idea you're expressing above. There isn't really any documentation on stealth tools apart from what appears in the reference sakai.properties found in /docs, so I've just included it in its entirety here.