[Bodington-developers] Bodington Configuration Changes

[Matthew B. <mat...@co...>]

As I mentioned in an earlier post the current WebLearn builds have some 
changes to the way configuration is done and I thought I should outline 
them:

SetupServlet no longer blats values with defaults.
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It is currently the case that if you configure Bodington (through 
SetupServlet) then edit bodington.properties to change some values that 
can't be configured through SetupServlet the next time you run 
SetupServlet these values will get overritten. I have changed 
SetupServlet so that it only sets defulat values in the configuration 
file that don't have an existing value.

Splitting of bodington.properties.
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At the moment the bodington.properties file is the only place for 
configuration information. This causes problems in that at the moment 
SetupServlet sets default values in the main properties file and then 
when we come to an upgrade we can't easily tell if it is safe to change 
them. In WebLearn HEAD I have configuration commit from 3 places:

- bodington-default.properties: This file contains the defaults that 
SetupServlet used to set. It is wrapped up into the bodserver.jar and 
shouldn't be edited on any installs.

- context properties: I have code in the ContextListener the puts any 
parameters found in the context as Bodington properties. This allows 
automatic setup of a bodington install by using deploy time context 
parameters (context.xml in Tomcat world).

- bodington.properties: This is the normaly bodington properties file 
that contains only the configuration information set by the user.

These three property sources are chained with the first value being 
returned and the parent being consulted only if these isn't a value set:

bodington.properties -> context properties -> bodington-defaults

Existing bodington.properties files should continue to work but new ones 
will only contain properties the user has configured.

This is not seen as a good long term solution but goes some way to 
making configuration easier to manage.

Any comments about me pushing these changes over to Bodington HEAD?
The reaons for this is that they are related to the Quickstart WAR.

-- 
+--Matthew Buckett-----------------------------------------+
| VLE Developer, Learning Technologies Group               |
| Tel: +44 (0) 1865 283660 http://www.oucs.ox.ac.uk/       |
+------------Computing Services, University of Oxford------+