Provisional tools are included with Sakai, but are hidden by default
("stealthed" in Sakaispeak). To make them available, you can:
- Add them to a specific site using the admin site tool - just add a
new page to the site and add the tool to it. The is useful if you want
to use the tool without making it available to all users.
- Set a value for
stealthTools@org.sakaiproject.tool.api.ActiveToolManager in
sakai.properties.
Provisional Tools as of Sakai 2.3
Glenn Golden
Sakai ships with applications considered "provisional". Provisional
applications are "almost ready for prime time". The distribution
includes the provisional applications, but the tools from these
applications are "stealthed". Stealthed tools don't show up in
WorksiteSetup for inclusion in sites. They are available using the
Admin Sites editor for placement into sites is desired.
The list of stealthed tools is shipped with Sakai in the internal
sakai.properties file that is used to provide default values for
various configuration options. The setting is:
stealthTools@org.sakaiproject.tool.api.ActiveToolManager=
followed by a comma separated list of tool ids (such as
"sakai.assignment").
If we want a provisional "stealthed" tool in a particular Sakai
configuration, we have some ugly options. We can modify the
"stealthTools" setting in the default sakai.properties file in the
components module of the source distribution, but that becomes hard
to maintain as we update to new versions of the Sakai code base.
We can override the "stealthTools" setting by entering it in our
sakai.properties (usually located in tomcat/sakai). To do this, we
need to copy the line from the default file into our
sakai.properties, then remove the tools from this list that we want
to keep. This has two problems; first, the double negative effect
(removing the name of the tool we want to keep), and that we
replicate the values in the default file, so that when the code base
is updated, we have a similar maintenance problem.
What we really want is a way to list tools in our own
sakai.properties that we want to be visible, even if they have been
stealthed. We don't want to have to replicate accurately the entire
stealthed list, we just state those we want visible. And while we
are at it, it would be nice to have a simple way to list some more
tools we want to hide, even if they are not stealthed.
Well, here we go:
visibleTools@org.sakaiproject.tool.api.ActiveToolManager=
hiddenTools@org.sakaiproject.tool.api.ActiveToolManager=
These settings will NOT be used in the default file, so their values
free to be used in our sakai.properties files.
To make a stealthed tool visible, add the "visibleTools" line, with a
comma separated list of tool ids. To make more tools hidden, add the
"hiddenTools" line.
Without these, the "stealthTools" setting we ship controls what is
hidden. With these, the stealthTools list plus the hiddenTools list,
minus the visibleTools list, controls the tools that are hidden.
We can still override the "stealthTools" setting in our
sakai.properties if we want to.
When the tool manager starts up, it will now list the tools hidden,
like this:
INFO: init(): hidden tools: osp.synoptic.design.publish
osp.presLayout sakai.postem osp.exposedwizard sakai.site.roster
osp.reports osp.wizard sakai.sitemanage osp.presTemplate
sakai.metaobj osp.guidance.sample osp.style sakai.messagecenter
sakai.rwiki osp.presentation osp.evaluation osp.glossary
osp.exposedmatrix sakai.search osp.synoptic osp.matrix sakai.chat
blogger sakai.assignment (2006-10-08 13:37:11,112
main_org.sakaiproject.tool.impl.ToolComponent)
This is being tracked under SAK-6726, and will be in 2.3 as of 005.
