With the App Dev Pack available on Windows and IAM server out of beta, HCL and IBM have done the work to go beyond the anonymous access to Domino data from Node.js. And with Engage around the corner, no doubt all speakers are thinking about demos, if they haven’t started doing them already.
Obviously installing proton and using it with anonymous access is easiest – extract the app dev pack, set a few note.ini variables, load data into the node-demo.nsf and you’re good to go. But I doubt many companies will use that kind of configuration in practice. So although creating demos that work with anonymous access is easiest in order for attendees to investigate the code, it leaves major question marks for turning that demo code into production code. It is something already raised at the HCL Factory Tour earlier this year.
Setting up SSL for proton, setting up the ID Vault, setting up client certificates, the IAM server etc is not straightforward. It’s probably beyond the scope of any given session at Engage. And personally I doubt if more than a handful of Engage attendees will already have that environment set up. I doubt many more will go away from Engage and set up that kind of environment themselves in the following weeks in order to investigate the demos speakers create with authentication. Hopefully by the time of Engage there will be an answer for that which, though not just “click-and-go”, will at least be more straightforward.
But the node-demo.nsf database,which is included in the App Dev Pack, isn’t designed out-of-the-box to set Readers fields on any data, which would be required to showcase the SSL access and IAM server functionality. If you’re used it for DQL Explorer, you’ll also notice that the State field isn’t on the Contact form, so you can’t export that via DQL Explorer unless you make changes. The good news is that node-demo.nsf is just a copy of XPages Extension Library Demo database, which is also open source. So I’ve now made those amendments and released the resulting database on OpenNTF.
If you just need anonymous access, it’s probably easiest to just carry on using node-demo.nsf. If you want Readers fields applied, use this database instead. On the Admin_Home XPage you’ll see an extra area, a Name Picker to select one or more users from your directory. If you select, say, 4 people then one or more will be added to a Readers field on the Contacts. There will also be a ConfigReaders field applied which gives users with the [Configuration] role access to all Contacts.
As the administrator, with the [Configuration] role, you’ll see all Contacts, as in the first screenshot below. As one of those specific users, you’ll only see the Contacts for whom you’ve been randomly entered into the Readers field.
Hopefully this will then be of use as a demo database for proving reader-level access to different data. In time, this will also be rolled back into the full XPages Extension Library repo.
