GOCDB/Release4/Development

Recent Completed Developments

• Cleaned old roles - June 2011 https://rt.egi.eu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=931
• Added a URL field to service endpoint objects to support UNICORE services - May 2011 https://rt.egi.eu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=975 (note, even though a single URL field is displayed per Endpoint, a new Gocdb_Endpoint_Location entity was created in order to link multiple service endpoint locations per SE if this becomes a future requirement - see Media:GocdbGlue2UnicoreV2.pdf).
• Add a "my site" link in the main menu - May 2011 https://rt.egi.eu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=1091 (note, this uses the new controller-per page with templates design as summarized below).
• Record Certification Status History - May 2011 https://rt.egi.eu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=939
• Allow authorised operators to suspend sites at central level - March 2011 https://rt.egi.eu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=1094
• Show when a site entered the current production status - March 2011 https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/GOCDB/PI/get_cert_status_date

Current Developments

See GOCDB/Release4/Feedback : This page groups all feedback received on the new system.

The list of [GOCDB development items is available in the EGI RT ticket tracker]

These are the developments we are currently working on. They come from the agreed development list, as defined by the Operational Tools Advisory Group (OTAG) who filters and prioritizes user requests. As of June 2011, development plans are focused on re-developing and refactoring the current system in order to accommodate newly emerging feature requests that cannot be easily implemented with the current system. These include;

• The GUI logic needs to be re-developed. Currently GOCDB4 uses a generic module for drawing a forms and GUI components that uses a single code path for all form based operations. In doing this, the code has become too rigid making it difficult to deal with form requirements on a per-page basis. This module will be replaced with a more flexible controller per page architecture with view templates. This is necessary to address a number of the RT requirement requests (approximately half suggest GUI improvements).

• The current role model may need to be updated in order to cater for a finer grained permission model that is emerging as a new EGI requirement.

• The object cardinality logic needs to be refactored to fix known issues, particularly Domain, Production-Status and Service-Endpoint objects.

• Fix database transaction demarcation issues (e.g. on site creation Savannah 74860).

• Explicitly indicate if all SEs of a site are in downtime through the PI

• Redevelop the xml_output module to implement nested XML collections, probably using the Query2XML package. This is necessary because the existing XML Output module will only generate flat XML documents (e.g. that often map to individual DB entities). Currently SQL joins/associations between Sites, SEs and URLs cannot be represented as hierarchical/nested XML documents (for example, consider nesting multiple EndpointLocation objects/URLs in the ServiceEndpoint XML, see: Media:GocdbGlue2UnicoreV2.pdf).

• New ‘tagging’ logic is required so that new data-scoping rules can be applied to GOCDB entities, allowing Sites, Services and other GOCDB data to be identified as either ‘EGI,’ ‘Local’ or ‘some other’ scoped data. This is required for the Regional-Synchronizing GOCDB so that only appropriately scoped ‘EGI’ data is published to the central instance while locally scoped data and other customisations can be excluded. See GOCDB/Release4/Regionalisation#1.29_Data_Grouping.2FScoping

• Support for 'Virtual Site Entities (VSite)' There is a requirement to group existing Service Endpoints (currently grouped under their corresponding 'owning' physical Site) under a new 'Virtual Site' entity. See: https://rt.egi.eu/rt/Ticket/Display.html?id=987 and https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/Logical-site
  • At present, the proposed features of a VSite will include (see Media:VirtualSitesDesign.pdf‎):
    • A VSite will be a separate GOCDB entity, and will have users and other attributes much like an existing physical site but with different rules (described below). Importantly, we believe this grouping has to be a new gocdb object in order to clearly define the intended semantics of the grouping (e.g. both a 'VSite' and an imaginary 'VService' could both group many SEs, but a VSite has very different semantics to a VService !).
    • A VSite will be used to group existing Service Endpoints only (i.e. SEs that have already been created under their owning physical Site).
    • A VSite cannot group new SEs that have no owning physical site.
    • A single SE may only have a single parent physical Site (i.e. GOCDB cardinality of 1 between Site and SE)
    • A single SE can have many parent VSites (requires GOCDB cardinality of 'many-to-many' between Virtual Site and SE).
    • New PI queries are proposed to support querying of VSites and querying of SEs that are grouped under a VSite (much like the existing get_site and get_service_endpoint methods (https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/GOCDB/PI/get_service_endpoint_method and https://wiki.egi.eu/wiki/GOCDB/PI/get_site_method ). The following XML example is related: https://twiki.cern.ch/twiki/pub/Main/ATPVOFeeds/atp_vo_feed_example.xml
    • The permissions model of a VSite is not yet well defined. It is currently proposed that users with a role over the owning physical site should maintain their cascading permissions over their SEs (i.e. no modification to the current site/permissions model), however, users with a role over the VSite will not have any cascading permissions over the SEs. Consequently, this has the following important implications;
      • A VSite could not be used to declare a downtime for all its member SEs.
      • Similarly, users with a role over the VS will not be able to update/modify a member SE.
    • If VSite permissions are required (e.g. for declaring SE downtimes and modifying SEs), then a user may have to request a new role under the physical site or be granted a corresponding permission. These requirements are currently undefined.

• A Regional-Synchronizing GOCDB. See GOCDB/Release4/Regionalisation plans and progress report page.

development item	Estimated release	Estimated date
Provide a production quality package for GOCDB regional module	4.0d7	Oct 2010
Improvement of GOCDB failover system and backend replication	4.0.1	May 2011
New service endpoint URL associations for new service types (see above)	?	April/June 2011
Re-develop GUI Logic (see above)	?	Sept 2011 (EGI-Y2)
Update/refactor role model for finer grained permissions (see above)	?	EGI-Y2
Data scoping by tagging GOCDB entities (see above)	?	EGI-Y2
Regionalisation GOCDB/Release4/Regionalisation	?	EGI-Y2/3
Work on GOCDB and Operations Portal common front end	?	EGI-Y2
GOCDB interface to the dynamic information system (BDII/GluE)	?	EGI-Y3