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From: "Adam Ratcliffe" <adam@mrigitech.com>
To: <users@cocoon.apache.org>
Subject: RE: Cocoon-centric approach to customer configuration
Date: Thu, 9 Dec 2004 18:12:26 +1300
Message-ID: <GIEPIDBNNGGJHJLOKFANOEIODDAA.adam@mrigitech.com>
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Hi Jorg

I had a look at the authentication application feature
http://cocoon.apache.org/2.1/developing/webapps/authentication.html#Applicat
ion+Management

as this provides a way of getting customer-specific configuration data into
the
user's authentication context. Presumably I could then use the
CocoonComponentManager to
lookup the SessionManager and get full access to the configuration from any
of my
business objects or within the Flow layer.

I generally like this approach but I think I have an issue for customer
sites that don't require
a user to authenticate themself as the configuration is only loaded after a
successful
authentication. Maybe for these applications I could programatically create
the authentication
context and load the configuration into it via the AuthenticationManager
component which
provides a createApplicationContext() method.  This does seem like a bit of
a subversion of
the authentication framework, maybe side effects?

An alternative I'm considering is Commons Configuration. This provides a
generic
interface for configuration data from a variety of data sources, file, JDBC
etc.
A configuration object could be created for each customer configuration and
put into a Store,
then retrieved and set in the session when a user requests a URL belonging
to that customer.

As you pointed out this is probably getting more into the area of
application architecture
than cocoon usage specific. If you do have the time I'd be interested in
your view.

Cheers
Adam


-----Original Message-----
From: Jorg Heymans [mailto:jh@domek.be]
Sent: Tuesday, 7 December 2004 6:11 a.m.
To: users@cocoon.apache.org
Subject: Re: Cocoon-centric approach to customer configuration


Adam Ratcliffe wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm working on a Cocoon application that will be a hosted solution. I
> need to maintain independent configuration data for each customer
> related to such things as datasources, feature set etc. Because of the
> need to keep customer specific configuration separate from general
> system configuration I don't want to use cocoon.xconf, furthermore I'd
> like to be able to setup new customers without requiring a server restart.

This is very much an application architecture question rather than
cocoon specific IMO. Adding new customer configurations at runtime is
something you should handle yourself in the application, there might be
cocoon components that help you do this but there is no clear-cut plugin
or component for this.

HTH, if not rephrase your question to be a bit more specific?

Regards
Jorg


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