Deprecated. This material represents early efforts and may be of interest to historians. It doe not describe current VIVO efforts.
Deprecated. This material represents early efforts and may be of interest to historians. It doe not describe current VIVO efforts.
Introduction
Are you developing code for VIVO? Are you doing some extreme customization? You might benefit from VIVO's set of built-in diagnostic tools.
These tools help to reveal how VIVO operates behind the scenes. In general, they are only used during development, because they may have serious negative effects on the performance of the VIVO application. However, they may also be used (carefully) in production, to diagnose a particularly difficult problem.
The diagnostic tools are enabled and controlled by settings within VIVO. These settings may be changed interactively, without restarting VIVO. The settings may also be read from a file, so they will be in effect as VIVO is starting up.
Terms
Developer Mode
When the diagnostic tools are enabled, VIVO is said to be running in "Developer Mode". This reflects the fact that all of the developer settings are ignored unless the tools as a whole are enabled.
Developer Settings
These are parameters that control the diagnostic tools. They may be set interactively, using the Developer Panel, or read from the developer.settings file at startup.
The Developer Panel
When VIVO is in developer mode, the Developer Panel appears on every page. This serves two purposes:
- It enables you to change the Developer Settings without navigating away from your current page.
- It provides a visual reminder that VIVO is in Developer Mode. If a production instance were accidentally configured to run in Developer Mode, it would be easily noticed.
Entering Developer Mode
developer.properties file
When VIVO starts up, it looks for a file in the home directory, named developer.properties. If the file is found, the settings are read from it. Any settings that are not found in the file keep their default values. If the file is not found, then all settings keep their default values until set interactively.
A typical developer.properties file
developer.enabled=true developer.permitAnonymousControl=true developer.defeatFreemarkerCache=true
This example causes:
- Developer Mode is enabled immediately. The specified settings are in effect even while VIVO is starting.
- Users who are not logged in can manipulate the developer settings. Obviously, this should only be permitted on a development system.
- The Freemarker template cache is defeated. Each time a template is requested, it will be loaded from disk. This will cause VIVO to run more slowly, but it means that a developer can see the effects of a template change immediately, instead of waiting for the template to expire and be reloaded.
The VIVO distribution includes an example.developer.properties file. It contains descriptions of all of the settings, with examples. You can rename example.developer.properties to developer.properties, and uncomment the settings you want to use.
Interactively entering developer mode
Log in as a system administrator (or root). Go to the Site Administration page. Click on Activate developer panel.
The Developer Panel will immediately appear below the page header. You may open it and change the settings, or you may navigate through VIVO. The Developer Panel will continue to appear in every page (except for pages that are used to edit the ontology).
The settings
When open, the developer panel looks like this:
The following tables show the meaning of each setting in the developer panel, and how to specify it in the developer.properties file.
General settings
| In the panel | Enable developer mode |
|---|---|
| In the file | developer.enabled |
| Effect | Causes the developer panel to be displayed on each VIVO page. Enables all of the other developer settings. If this is false, other settings will retain their values, but will not take effect. |
| In the panel | Allow anonymous user to see and modify developer settings |
|---|---|
| In the file | developer.permitAnonymousControl |
| Effect | If true, any VIVO user may change the developer settings. If false, only a system administrator (or root) may change the settings. |
Freemarker settings
| In the panel | Defeat the template cache |
|---|---|
| In the file | developer.defeatFreemarkerCache |
| Effect | If true, each Freemarker template is loaded from disk each time it is used. If false, a template change may be on disk for up to one minute before it is loaded. |
| In the panel | Insert HTML comments and start and end of templates |
|---|---|
| In the file | developer.insertFreemarkerDelimiters |
| Effect | If true, you may view the HTML source for a VIVO page to see which Freemarker templates were used to create each portion of the page. |
| In the panel | |
|---|---|
| In the file | developer. |
| Effect |
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| In the file | developer. |
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| In the file | developer. |
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| In the file | developer. |
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| In the file | developer. |
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Overview
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