Configuration File Settings

The following is a list of all of the possible parameters available in the Configuration.properties. Not all of these settings are required for your installation. If the setting you wish to configure does not appear in the Configuration.properties file you can simply add it to the file.

Entry Purpose
DB_HOST The IP address or fully qualified name for your database server
DB_USER This is the name of the database user created previously
DB_PASSWORD This is the password for the above database user
DB_URL Make sure that the correct entry is uncommented and edited for your DBMS (Oracle, mySQL or MSSQL). The entry for HOST should be set to the same as DB_HOST above. Examples of this entry are: For Oracle connection jdbc:oracle:thin:@(DESCRIPTION=(ADDRESS=(HOST=db.yourdomain.com)(PROTOCOL=tcp) (PORT=1521))(CONNECT_DATA=(SID=ev))) For SQL Server connection with JTDS driver jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://db.yourdomain.com:1433/extraview For mySQL Server connection jjdbc:mysql://db.yourdomain.com:3306/ev
JDBCDriver Make sure that the correct entry is uncommented and edited for your DBMS. Examples are: For Oracle connection oracle.jdbc.driver.OracleDriver For SQL Server connection with JTDS driver net.sourceforge.jtds.jdbc.Driver For mySQL connection with mySQL driver com.mysql.jdbc.Driver
DBMS_INTERFACE Make sure that the correct entry is uncommented and edited for your DBMS. Examples are: For Oracle connection com.extraview.dbms.oracle.OracleDbms For SQL Server connection com.extraview.dbms.mssql.MssqlDbms
DEFAULT_LOG_LEVEL Sets the DEBUG_LEVEL at startup. The level of messages directed to the log is controlled with a debug level. This is a number between 1 and 12, with higher numbers offering increasing amounts of information written to the log file. The default is 6. This number should not be increased without cause, as there will be a hit on system performance, and the size of the log file may increase dramatically. The level of messages that is sent to the log is controlled by a URL and is used as follows, substituting the appropriate domain and application name: httpD//server.yourdomain.com/ExtraView?DEBUG=6 Note that users or administrators do not have access to this URL, unless the behavior setting named ALLOW_DEBUG_URL within the System Debugging & User Custom Settings on the Advanced administration menu is set to YES.
PSP_LOG This may have values of YES, NO or ALL. The default is NO. When this is YES, then the ExtraView log will contain the SQL of all key statements executed. Setting the value to ALL will write all SQL statements executed to the log. This can be useful for debugging purposes
AJAX_LOG This may have the value of YES or NO. The default is NO. When this is YES, then the ExtraView log will contain additional information about Ajax calls made from the client browsers to the server, including the execution time of each Ajax call. This can be useful for debugging purposes
TASK_LOG This may have the value of YES or NO.  If ommitted, it has the value of NO.  When set to YES, ExtraView tasks will write additional information to the log file when they execute
LOG_FILE_DIR_ABSOLUTE The absolute directory name (directory only)
LOG_FILE_DIR The relative directory name (directory only)
LOG_FILE_MANAGE_SCRIPT This script will be called instead of deleting log files. The script and filename of the log file will be executed in separate process. The filename is passed as a single parameter to the script.
LOG_FILE_MAX_RETAINED The maximum number of log files retained before the oldest is deleted. The default is 10.
LOG_FILE_MAX_SIZE The maximum size of the log file in kilobytes. The log file is automatically archived when it grows beyond this size, and a fresh one is created. The old log is renamed, using the rule set in LOG_TIME_AT_CREATION to rename the file. If you are working within a clustered application server environment, all nodes on the cluster share one log file. The default maximum is 20,000
LOG_FILE_PATH_NAME_ABSOLUTE The absolute full path name (directory and filename)
LOG_FILE_PATH_NAME The pathname to the log that ExtraView will be written to. The default path is logs/EVJ.log. Note that this path is relative to the WEB-INF directory
LOG_TIME_AT_CREATION If true log will have a DATETIME stamp in its name. At creation no renaming will be done. The default is false.
XML_LOG_FLAG TRUE or FALSE. If this is FALSE (the default) then the log is written in text format. If the value is TRUE, then the log is written in XML format
WEB_SERVER_NAME The name of the web server that will be used internally in ExtraView. With one application server, this name is not important, but if you have a cluster of application servers, then these should be named logically to identify which web server carried out which action and to ensure that sessions initiated at a client browser will “stick” to the same application server
TEMPLATE_DIR The name of the directory, relative to WEB-INF where the ExtraView HTML templates are stored. There is normally no need to alter this path
USER_TEMPLATE_DIR The path to the directory, relative to WEB-INF where user HTML templates are stored. These are stored independently from the ExtraView HTML templates so they may be retained during an upgrade
CHART_DIR When ExtraView creates charts, it requires a directory in which to store temporary files. This path is also relative to WEB-INF. The administrator should create a process that cleans out old files from this directory on a periodic basis
TEMP_DIR This path, relative to WEB-INF is used to store temporary files. The administrator should create a process that cleans out old files from this directory on a periodic basis
DATA_DIR This path, relative to WEB-INF is used to store temporary files. The administrator should create a process that cleans out old files from this directory on a periodic basis
DEBUG_SWITCH The default is ON. If you want to turn off debugging, then this may be set to OFF. This is not recommended
DEBUG_LOG_LEVEL This may have an integer value from 1 to 12. The default level is 6. At any level, all messages for this level and greater are logged. At the default level of 6, all server accesses to ExtraView are recorded in the log file, with the entry to the service being logged as well as the exit from the service. At the exit time, additional information such as the length of time that the service took to execute, and the user ID of the person making the access is also recorded. If there is any error message with a debug level higher than 6, this is also placed in the log file. For example, any warnings or program exceptions will be placed in the log
SSO_DO_UPSERT If you are using a SSO server and making use of the “upsert” feature, then this should be set to YES, else leave this at the default value of NO
SSO_DN_USER_ID_ATTRIBUTE This is the SSO header attribute from which to extract the User ID as a value in a distinguished name (DN) in the SSO header. This takes the form of <attribute>[<instance>], where the <attribute> is the type of the relative distinguished name (RDN) and the <instance> is the number of the RDN of that type, counting from the right-hand side of the DN
MAILBOX The path name of the mailbox that notification will use
NOTIFICATION This is an optional property, and based upon RFC 1891 (see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1891.txt). The property may be any combination of: NOTIFY_DELAY NOTIFY_FAILURE NOTIFY_SUCCESS with each option separated by a semi-colon. If this property is set, and your SMTP server supports this RFC, then the appropriate header is set in all SMTPMessage’s originated by the BatchMail process. This functionality allows for an audit trail to be followed for emails sent via your email server.
RETURN_OPTION This is an optional property, and based upon RFC 1891 (see http://www.ietf.org/rfc/rfc1891.txt). The property may be either: RETURN_FULL or RETURN_HDRS If this property is set, and your SMTP server supports this RFC, then the appropriate header for return emails is set in all SMTPMessage’s originated by the BatchMail process. This functionality allows for an audit trail to be followed for emails sent via your email server.
ENCRYPT_PROPERTIES The property ENCRYPT_PROPERTIES=YES will enable the capability of encrypting property values in the Configuration.properties file as an added security measure. Each property value to be encrypted has the form:
<property-name> = ENC(encrypted-value)

ExtraView has a utility that will encrypt values, and provide the result as a base64-encoded binary string. This string is used within the parentheses in the ENC( ) to provide the encrypted value. The password for the decryption is located in a file named pdata located in the configuration directory, or it is located in a file with the file name defined by the PDATA_FILE_NAME property. If the file cannot be read or does not exist, the password used is magic. To encrypt a text string to use as a password, you use the Windows batch script or the Linux sh script named encrypt.bat or encrypt.sh. The scripts are found in the directory named WEB-INF/data. There are required parameters, as follows:

Windows

There are 5 required parameters:

  • JAVA_HOME, more specifically the bin directory
  • TOMCAT_HOME, where the application server is installed
  • INSTANCE, the ExtraView instance name
  • valueString, the value to be encrypted
  • passwordString, the password to be used for the decryption

For example:

encrypt.bat c:\java\jdk1.6.0_26 c:\Apache\tomcat7 evj myValue myPassword

The output will show the encrypted value appropriate for the insertion in the ENC( ) value of a property in the configuration file. Copy this value and paste it in between the parentheses.

Linux

Modify the file named encrypt.sh before you run this. You should substitute the appropriate values for your system, for the following:

  • JAVA_HOME, more specifically the bin directory
  • TOMCAT_HOME, where the application server is installed
  • EV_BASE, the path to your ExtraView instance

The syntax to execute the command then becomes:

encrypt.sh evj myValue myPassword

where

  • evj is the ExtraView instance name
  • myValue, the value to be encrypted
  • myPassword, the password to be used for the decryption

The output will show the encrypted value appropriate for the insertion in the ENC( ) value of a property in the configuration file

PDATA_FILE_NAME See the previous entry ENCRYPT_PROPERTIES for a description of how this property is used
DB_FORCE_CLOSE_METHOD If specified, this names a Connection method that can be used to force a Connection closure, without waiting for database resources. This has occasionally been found necessary on MySQL databases, where the MySQL Connector/J driver does not always behave predictably, causing ExtraView to hang. In the case of MySQL, the method name should be abortInternal. It is unusual to need this setting.
FROM_WAR If this setting is present, and has a value of TRUE, then ExtraView recognizes it is being run from within a WAR file. In most instances this is not needed as ExtraView automatically recognizes the WAR file configuration, but some application servers (notably JBoss) do not correctly report the presence of the WAR file configuration. In these cases, it is required to set this parameter
Connection pool settings These are described in detail in the section of this guide named Connection Pool Configuration