Admin Console: ConfigAdmin

I'm looking forward to see improvements to the dm Server Admin Console as posted in the latest team blog as a more useful management web client would help me as a developer to persuade my conservative server administrators to run and manage productive dm Server instances. At the moment I miss the function to alter/edit ConfigAdmin properties. Actually I have a demo installation with the Felix WebConsole added as subsystem that provides such a functionality, but a native dm Server solution would be more pleasant.

Thanks for the positive feedback. I added a viewer for ConfigAdmin yesterday. It's only available in a development branch at the moment but I will be merging it back in to master for the nightly build in the next few days.

As for being able to edit the ConfigAdmin properties, I need to put a bit of thought in to how it should work. I suspect it will make it in to the 2.0 release but I can't promise. Your desire for it is certainly noted though.

Thanks, Chris.

I have raised a JIRA to cover this. Could you tell me how you are using this feature. Do your changes simply vanish on re-start or would you like to be able to persist them between re-starts.

At the moment we are using OPS4J ConfMan as a subsystem to propagate the configuration to the ConfigAdminService. With the next milestone build of dm Server we will probably use the property deployment feature instead that is actually working in the latest snapshots. :)

The configuration propagated - from any source - to the ConfigAdminService will vanish if Equinox is started with the clean flag, meaning the persistent state of the configuration are the property files deployed to the pickup directory or the directory used by OPS4J ConfMan. Persistence of changes made at runtime via the AdminConsole between restarts would be cool, but I understand that implementing this feature is not trivial. Changing the configuration only at runtime would be sufficient. If I want the configuration update to be persistent I would have to edit the property file as well.

Thanks for the information. There will be a snapshot out with the new Admin Console features in the next few hours. Including a Config Admin viewer. There will be more updates over the following weeks and I will discuss the editing of config values when we plan in the next load of work.

Thanks again for your input, Chris.

If you change properties dynamically using the config admin service, e.g. in conjunction with the metatype service, dm server does not save them persistently. However, with dm server 2 using the felix config admin, there is a solution by setting the osgi property felix.cm.dir to a directory of choice which is not cleared over a server restart. Add an entry -Ffelix.cm.dir=... in the file bin/dmk.bat and in the program arguments of a STS server launch configuration. Note that existing properties in the directory config/ will take precedence.

Thanks for the comments,

We will not be adding this in dm Server as we have now donated the project to the Eclipse Foundation as a new project called Virgo. As such we will be changing the implementations of EventAdmin and ConfigAdmin to use the Eclipse ones. Hopefully their ConfigAdmin has similar functionality so we can add propper support for persisting the changes of ConfigAdmin properties. If this is something you would like to see please raise the Issue for Virgo. All the Virgo resources can be found from the website. http://www.eclipse.org/virgo/

Chris.