Curated Artifact Catalog

This Pentaho plugin provides a dashboard showing users what resources they can currently view, in a more accesible way. Instead of a tree of folders and files, the content is divided into sections and resources.

Sections are hierarchical tags, such as "Invoices" or "Sales", that can be optionally limited to certain roles and nested inside each other. Resources are extended descriptions of existing reports or dashboards, which are listed according to the ACL rules in Pentaho. A resource can belong to zero or more sections, and a report or a dashboard can only be described in one resource.

To see CAC in action, check the screencasts available on YouTube.

The development of this plugin has been funded through the research project "Data quality improvement and business intelligence platform for decision support" ("Mejora de la calidad de los datos y sistema de inteligencia empresarial para la toma de decisiones", 2013-031/PV/UCA-G/PR) of the University of Cádiz.

Assumptions

The plugin assumes that admin users have the Administrator role and logged-in users have the Authenticated role, as in the default Pentaho setup. This is currently not configurable, sorry!

This plugin has been tested with Pentaho 6.0.0 CE and three different database engines: HSQLDB 2.x (included with Pentaho), PostgreSQL 9.4 and MySQL 5.6.7.

Minimal installation from source

This installation uses the built-in HSQLDB database in a stock Pentaho install to store the catalog, and uses the CFR upload directory to store images.

Go to the Pentaho User Console, go to "File > Manage Data Sources..." and edit the SampleData JDBC datasource to make it use the pentaho_admin user. ArtifactCatalog needs a user that can create tables, and the default pentaho_user user cannot do that.
Clone the project outside of your Pentaho installation, and create a symlink to the artifactCatalog subfolder in your pentaho-solutions/system folder:
```
  cd /path/to/pentaho-solutions/system
  ln -s /path/to/pentaho-artifactCatalog artifactCatalog
```
Install the Community File Repository (CFR) plugin from the Marketplace. We require it for uploading images from the resource and section management dashboards, and (by default) to serve them.
Copy config.yaml.template to config.yaml.
Restart Pentaho.
As an admin, go to Tools > ArtifactCatalog and run the main artifactcatalog dashboard. This dashboard is also available to end users at the same URL. However, the edit buttons, dashboards and Kettle endpoints are limited to administrators.
We heavily recommend installing mogrify if you can (see "Image resizing" below).
We also recommend configuring Pentaho to make users authenticate through the Pentaho web-based form, instead of an ugly HTTP Basic form. See "Web-based authentication" below.

Customization options

By default, the plugin uses the "SampleData" HSQLDB database that comes with Pentaho. To use it, make sure you edit the SampleData data source within the Pentaho User Console and change the user to pentaho_admin (as the default pentaho_user does not have DBA rights on it). If you'd like to use a different database, edit config.yaml and change jndi to the name of the Pentaho data source to be used and ddlFile to the appropriate file within the database directory. Make sure that the user used in the connection has the ability to create tables in the database, and the plugin will take care of the rest.

Check the regular expressions for including and excluding artifacts for the admin-only section and resource forms. cfrUploadDirectory should be set to the absolute path to the directory where CFR stores its uploads: this usually should be the .cfr subfolder of your pentaho-solutions/system directory.

If you want to use a separate web server to host your images instead of CFR, you will need to customize imagesDirectory and imagesBaseURL. These should be set to the absolute path and base URL of the directory from which you will serve the static images. cfrGrantRead should be set to false in this scenario. Make sure that the user running Pentaho has write rights on imagesDirectory.

Image resizing

If you have mogrify available in some directory in your PATH, ArtifactCatalog will use it to resize uploaded images into the 375x200px size expected by the UI. In most Linux distributions, this tool is bundled into the imagemagick package, and in Mac OS X it is available through MacPorts as ImageMagick. There are also binary releases for Windows.

Company image

Optionally, you can customize dashboards/*.properties to provide your own welcome text and title for the catalog, and replace static/custom/img/logo.png with your company logo (default size is 64 x 64 pixels). For changing the colors of the page, static/custom/css/artifactCatalog.css should be customized.

Note: you may need to clean the .properties cache in CDF for these changes to be effective, by deleting the pentaho-solutions/system/pentaho-cdf-dd/tmp/.cache/system/artifactCatalog directory.

Web-based authentication

If you want users that go straight to this dashboard to authenticate through the default web-based form, you will need to edit pentaho-solutions/system/applicationContext-spring-security.xml so the endpoint for the main dashboard has the same security filters as a regular Pentaho page. This way, instead of an ugly HTTP Basic auth form you will get the default Pentaho login form.

The filterInvocationDefinitionSource property in the filterChainProxy bean has to be edited, adding at the beginning a pattern with the right URL and the same filters as for the /** pattern. It would look something like this (ignore the ...):

    <property name="filterInvocationDefinitionSource">
      <value>
        <![CDATA[CONVERT_URL_TO_LOWERCASE_BEFORE_COMPARISON
       PATTERN_TYPE_APACHE_ANT
      /plugin/artifactcatalog/api/artifactcatalog=securityContextHolderAwareRequestFilter,httpSessionPentahoSessionContextIntegrationFilter,httpSessionContextIntegrationFilter,httpSessionReuseDetectionFilter,logoutFilter,authenticationProcessingFilter,basicProcessingFilter,requestParameterProcessingFilter,anonymousProcessingFilter,exceptionTranslationFilter,filterInvocationInterceptor
      /webservices/**=...
       /api/**=...
       /plugin/**=...
       /**=securityContextHolderAwareRequestFilter,httpSessionPentahoSessionContextIntegrationFilter,httpSessionContextIntegrationFilter,httpSessionReuseDetectionFilter,logoutFilter,authenticationProcessingFilter,basicProcessingFilter,requestParameterProcessingFilter,anonymousProcessingFilter,exceptionTranslationFilter,filterInvocationInterceptor]]>
     </value>
   </property>