sTeam Server Object permissions and Doxygen Documentation

(ˢᵒᶜⁱᵉᵗʸserver) aims to be a platform for developing collaborative applications.
sTeam server project repository: sTeam.
sTeam-REST API repository: sTeam-REST

sTeam Server object permissions

sTeam command line lacks the functionality to read and set the object access permissions. The permission bits are: read,write, execute, move, insert,
annotate, sanction. The permission function was designed analogous to the getfacl() command in linux. It should display permissions as: rwxmias corresponding to the  permission granted on the object.

The the key functions are get_sanction, which returns a list of objects and permissions and sanction_object, which adds a new object and its set of permissions. The permissions is stored as an integer and the function should break the individual bits like getfact().

The permission bits for the sTeam objects are declared in the
access.h

// access.h: The permission bits

#define FAIL           -1 
#define ACCESS_DENIED   0
#define ACCESS_GRANTED  1
#define ACCESS_BLOCKED  2

#define SANCTION_READ          1
#define SANCTION_EXECUTE       2
#define SANCTION_MOVE          4
#define SANCTION_WRITE         8
#define SANCTION_INSERT       16
#define SANCTION_ANNOTATE     32

The get_sanction method defined in the access.pike returns a mapping which has the ACL(Access Control List) of all the objects in the sTeam server.


// Returns the sanction mapping of this object, if the caller is privileged
// the pointer will be returned, otherwise a copy.
final mapping
get_sanction()
{
    if ( _SECURITY->trust(CALLER) )
	return mSanction;
    return copy_value(mSanction);
}

The functions gets the permission values which are set for every object in the server.

The sanction_object method defined in the object.pike sets the permissions for the new objects.


// Set new permission for an object in the acl. Old permission are overwritten.
int sanction_object(object grp, int permission)
{
    ASSERTINFO(_SECURITY->valid_proxy(grp), "Sanction on non-proxy!");
    if ( query_sanction(grp) == permission )
      return permission; // if permissions are already fine

    try_event(EVENT_SANCTION, CALLER, grp, permission);
    set_sanction(grp, permission);

    run_event(EVENT_SANCTION, CALLER, grp, permission);
    return permission;
} 

This method makes use of the set_sanction which sets the permission onthe object. The task ahead is to make use of the above functions and write a sTeam-shell command which would provide the user to easily access and change the permissions for the objects.

Merging into the Source

The work done during GSOC 2016 by Siddhant and Ajinkya on the sTeam server was merged into the gsoc201-societyserver-devel and gsoc2016-source branches in the societyserver repository.
The merged code can be found at:

https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/tree/gsoc2016-source
https://github.com/societyserver/sTeam/tree/gsoc2016-societyserver-devel

The merged code needs to be tested before the debian package for the sTeam server is prepared. The testing has resulted into resolving of minor bugs.

Doxygen Documentation

The documentation for the sTeam is done using doxygen. The doxygen.pike is written and used to make the documentation for the sTeam server. The Doxyfile which includes the configuration for generating the sTeam documentation is modified and input files are added. The generated documentation is deployed on the gh-pages in the societyserver/sTeam repository.
The documentation can be found at:


http://societyserver.github.io/sTeam/files.html

The header files and the constants defined are also included in the sTeam documentation.

sTeam Documentation:

SocietyserverDoc

sTeam defined constants:

SocietyServerConstants

sTeam Macro Definitions:

SocietyServerMacroDefnitions

Feel free to explore the repository. Suggestions for improvements are welcomed.

Checkout the FOSSASIA Idea’s page for more information on projects supported by FOSSASIA.

Continue ReadingsTeam Server Object permissions and Doxygen Documentation

Generating Documentation and Modifying the sTeam-REST API

(ˢᵒᶜⁱᵉᵗʸserver) aims to be a platform for developing collaborative applications.
sTeam server project repository: sTeam.
sTeam-REST API repository: sTeam-REST

Documentation

Documentation is an important part of software engineering. Types of documentation include:

  1. Requirements – Statements that identify attributes, capabilities, characteristics, or qualities of a system. This is the foundation for what will be or has been implemented.
  2. Architecture/Design – Overview of software. Includes relations to an environment and construction principles to be used in design of software components.
  3. Technical – Documentation of code, algorithms, interfaces, and APIs.
  4. End user – Manuals for the end-user, system administrators and support staff.
  5. Marketing – How to market the product and analysis of the market demand.

Doxygen

Doxygen is the de facto standard tool for generating documentation from annotated C++ sources, but it also supports other popular programming languages such as C, Objective-C, C#, PHP, Java, Python, IDL (Corba, Microsoft, and UNO/OpenOffice flavors), Fortran, VHDL, Tcl, and to some extent D.
The Doxygen treats files of other languages as C/C++ and creates documentation for it accordingly.
sTeam documentation was tried to be created with the doxygen. But empty documentation was created due to the lack of the doxygen annotations used in the project.
 Doxygen doc generation.
DoxyGenTerminal
Doxygen Docs
DoxyDoc
The next way to create documentation was to make use of the autodoc utility provided by the Pike. The utility to generate docs was provided in the later versions of the Pike(>=8.0.155).
The autodoc files are generated and  later these are converted into  html pages. The commands used for generating the autodoc include:-
pike -x extract_autodoc /source
pike -x autodoc_to_html /src /opfile
The autodoc_to_html utility converts a single autodoc file to an html page. As a result a shell script was written to convert all the generated autodoc files to the html file.
docGenerator.sh
#!/bin/bash  

shopt -s globstar  
for filename in ./**/*.pike.xml; do  
    outputFile=doc/${filename#./}  
    outputFile=${outputFile%.xml}."html"  
    if [ -d $(dirname "./"$outputFile) ]; then  
      touch "./"$outputFile  
    else  
      mkdir -p $(dirname "./"$outputFile) && touch "./"$outputFile  
    fi  
    pike -x autodoc_to_html $filename "./"$outputFile  
done  

Autodoc Documentation
AutoDocThe documentation generated by this was less informative and lacked the referrals to other classes and headers. The societyserver project was developed long back but the autodoc utility was introduced in the later versions of pike. As a result the source files lacked the autodoc tags which are required to generate a well informative documentation with bindings to other files.

Restructuring the sTeam-REST API

The sTeam-REST API project made use of the angular-seed to initiate the development during the early phases. However these files still existed in the project. This had lead to a pandemonium and created difficulty in understanding the project. The files had to be removed and the app was in dire need of a restructuring. The following issues have been reported and resolved.

Issue. Github Issue Github PR
sTeam-REST Issues Issues PR

The new UI can be seen below.

Home

Home

Register

Register

About

About

Testing the REST API

The functionality to run the tests using the npm test command was added to the project. Now the user can run the tests using these commands instead of the traditional approach of running the tests using jasmine-node and specifying the test directory. The domain name of the urls to which the request was sent was changed. The e2e tests and frisby tests were conducted successfully.

e2e Tests.

e2eTests

Frisby Tests

NPM tests

The next step would be to do add more tests for the REST API.

Feel free to explore the repository. Suggestions for improvements are welcomed.

Checkout the FOSSASIA Idea’s page for more information on projects supported by FOSSASIA.

Continue ReadingGenerating Documentation and Modifying the sTeam-REST API