Application configuration
You must configure siguanet-desktop so that users in your organization can run it out of the box. This mainly involves generating an application configuration file named SIGUANETDesktop.prefs which must be included in the build and deployed along with the main executable.
In order to generate the .prefs file you can run siguanet-desktop and execute the Herramientas > Opciones menu option or, more conveniently, run siguanet-desktop --configure from the command line. You'll be presented with a dialog window that helps you create and update the .prefs file, which is simply a binary serialization of a set of hashtables. Basically, each entry field within a category in the configuration dialog matches a key/value pair within a hashtable.
Let's have a look at the configuration keys you can set using the configuration GUI by category.
The siguanet_quest client is one of the main tools inside siguanet-desktop. It uses Npgsql as the data provider, so the application requires the database server parameters, including a user account, to connect to PostgreSQL. The preferred way for standard users is to get their database connection string from an encrypted XML file located on a web server. Files of this kind, also named remote settings files ( .srs ), must be created by application administrators as explained in the Generating SIGUANET remote settings files section. Here you have the configuration keys on database credentials, matched to their corresponding fields in the dialog (see image below):
- [1] AuthUseLocal: When set to "true", the user must manually provide PostgreSQL connection parameters. This is not recommended for standard users.
- [2] AuthUseRemote: When set to "true", the application will download and decrypt an appropriate .srs file in order to build the PostgreSQL connection string.
- [3] AuthDownloadURL: When [2] is set to "true", a string must be assigned to this key which corresponds to the HTTP directory the application will request .srs files from.
- [4] AuthDownloadUsingCredentials: When set to "true", requests to the .srs HTTP directory will be done using HTTP Basic Authentication.
- [5] AuthDownloadWithLogin: User name for accessing the .srs HTTP directory when HTTP Basic Authentication is required.
- [6] AuthDownloadWithPassword: Password for accessing the .srs HTTP directory when HTTP Basic Authentication is required.
Application and database administrators should be considered as root users. Root users (as opposed to standard users) are an specific profile within siguanet-desktop and are always required to manually provide PostgreSQL connection parameters. Hence, the application ignores database credentials configuration. Read the Configuring user profiles section for more information.
Once the user's profile is determined after login, the preferred way for siguanet-desktop is trying to download the corresponding profile definition XML document from a web server. This is what we call the siguanet-desktop document ( .sgd), which effectively defines what are the tools and functionality available for a particular user's profile. As with .srs files, application administrators must create and maintain one .sgd file per profile. Please refer to the Configuring user profiles section for details.