#CSUC14

1. A Groovy Way to Interface With
Cascade Server
Creating a Phone Directory & Course Pages
Tom Wilkinson
Cuyahoga Community College

2. This presentation is for you if
• You have written programs in some procedural
object oriented language
• You have created Data Definitions and Velocity
or XSLT formats in Cascade
• You are familiar with Active Directory
• You are familiar with Web Services
• You need to develop interfaces to Cascade
• You know or are willing to learn Groovy

3. About Me
• Worked at the Tri-C full time since 1974
• Worked in IT since 1980
• Worked with C# since 2005
• Worked with HTML, CSS and JavaScript since
2008
• Worked with Groovy since 2013
• Married with 3 adult children, 2 grandchildren
and 3 dogs

4. Agenda
• About Cuyahoga Community College
• About Our Project
• Groovy
• Phone Directory
• Velocity
• Workforce Training Course Pages
• Structured Data Nodes
• Questions

5. About Cuyahoga Community College
• First Community College in Ohio, opened in
1963
• 1,000 credit courses each semester
• 600 non-credit courses are offered annually
• 60,000 credit and non-credit students each
year
• 4 campus locations and 7 other sites

6. Cuyahoga Community College
Tri-C

7. About Cuyahoga Community College
Student Profile
• Average age is 29 years old
• Student ages range from 15 to 75+
• 61% are women
• 39% are from minority groups
• 65% study part-time
• 56% are seeking an associate degree or are taking courses
to prepare for transfer to a four-year institution
• 30% are focusing in areas related to health careers
• 17% attend only evening or weekend classes
• 67% are enrolled in technical job training courses
• 17% are enrolled in business programs

8. About Our Project
Goals
• Create one site to serve both mobile and
desktop
• Fast site with less pages, images and
documents that are more timely and accurate
• A CMS platform that is easy to maintain and
update
• A CMS that will allow us the flexibility to
modify CSS, HTML and JavaScript quickly to
meet Interactive Communications needs

9. About Our Project
Current Status
• We plan to go live with the new site the third
week of November 2014
• We had Cascade for 1.5 years but the project
was delayed by non-technical reasons
• Curent site has over 2,500 pages, over 6,200
documents and over 3,400 images

10. Groovy
Why?
• PHP is forbidden by our Office of Safe and
Secure Computing
• Works with Cascade Web Services
• Easy for C# developers to understand
• Less verbose then Java
• Can (practically) do anything Java can do
• Banner XE uses Groovy

11. Groovy
Sample Code
1. package groovytest
2. import groovy.sql.Sql
3. class NewGroovyClass {
4. static main(args) {
5. def configFile = new File('config.groovy').toURI().toURL();
6. def config = new ConfigSlurper().parse(configFile)
7. def sql = Sql.newInstance(config.sqlConnection)
8. sql.eachRow( 'select * from Status' ) {
9. println "$it.id -- ${it.Name}"
10. }
11. }
12. }
config.groovy:
sqlConnection = 'jdbc:jtds:sqlserver://testserver/Test_DB'

12. Phone Directory
Overview

13. Phone Directory
Process Part 1
• Groovy application queries Active Directory
for all staff that are not hidden
• Reformats department names and locations
• Creates XML document on an internal web
server

14. Phone Directory
Process Part 2
• Cascade reads in XML feed block during page
publishing and a velocity script converts it to
JSON and imbeds it in the Phone Directory
page
• The published Phone Directory page is a Single
Page Application (SPA) containing the search
functionality

15. Phone Directory
Tool
• Gradle 1.8
• IntelliJ IDEA 13.1 (or whatever you like)
• Visual Studio 2013 for HTML, CSS and
JavaScript (or whatever you like)

16. Phone Directory
Libraries
• Groovy 2.3.3
• org.apache.directory.api 1.0.0-M24
• groovy-ldap
• org.slf4j 1.7.7
• ch.qos.logback 1.1.2
• activation 1.0.2
• javax.mail 1.4.7
• Jquery 1.11
• Telerik Kendo UI (JavaScript Library)

17. Groovy LDAP
with Apache Directory LDAP API
def ret = new ArrayList<Person>()
def ldap = LDAP.newInstance(uri, user, password)
ldap.eachEntry ("(&(objectclass=user)(objectcategory=person)(employeeNumber=*))") { person ->
def p = new Person()
p.department = DepartmentFilter(person.department)
p.email = person.mail
p.fax = person.facsimiletelephonenumber
p.isFaculty = IsFaculty(person.memberof)
p.location = MakeLocation(person.businesscategory, person.streetaddress)
p.name = MakeName(person.sn, person.givenname, person.middlename, person.personaltitle)
p.firstName = person.givenname
p.lastName = person.sn
p.phone = person.telephonenumber
p.room = person.physicaldeliveryofficename
p.title = person.title
ret << p
}

18. Phone Directory
Groovy Classes
Class Name Description
App Setups logging, deletes old logs files, reads
configuration file, calls ADInterface to get
user, calls XMLGenerater to output XML file
ADInterface Get all unhidden employees, fixes department
names and locations
Person DTO from ADInterface to XMLGenerator
XMLGenerator Creates XML file with person, department and
location nodes
DESCodec Decrypt AD users password from
configuration file
LogUtility Delete old log files

19. Phone Directory
Execution
• Extracted 269 departments
• Extracted 11 locations
• Extracted 3847 people
• Normal end took 1 minutes, 2.314 seconds

20. Phone Directory
Demo

21. Velocity
Tips
• Empty inner HTML is turn into an empty tag
<a href=“#”></a>  <a href=“#”/>
<a href=“#”> </a>  <a href=“#”></a>
• #set will not work with nulls
#set($x = ‘old value’)
#set($x = function-that-return-null())
$x is still ‘old value’
• Must manually escape and “ before using
$_EscapeTool.javascript for JSON

22. Workforce Training Course Pages
Overview

23. Workforce Training Course Pages
Process
• Retrieve all workforce courses, sections and
prerequisites
• Update or Create corresponding course page
• Remove any course pages not in the database

24. Workforce Training Course Pages
Tools
• Maven 3.0.5
• Gradle 1.8
• IntelliJ IDEA 13.1 (or whatever you like)

25. Workforce Training Course Pages
Libraries
• Cascade Web Service generated from WSDL
• axis 1.4
• Jtds 1.3.1
• Jsoup 1.7.3
• Groovy 2.3.3
• org.slf4j 1.7.7
• ch.qos.logback 1.1.2
• activation 1.0.2
• javax.mail 1.4.7

26. Workforce Training Course Pages
Groovy Classes
Class Description
App Sets up logging, reads configuration file, deletes old log files,
setup AdvantageInterface and CascadeInterface then calls
BusinessLogic
BusinessLogic Gets courses, sections and prerequisites using
AdvantageInterface and updates course pages in Cascade
using CascadeInterface, removes old course pages
AdvantageInterface Uses SQL Queries to get Courses, sections and prerequisites
Course DTO for courses
Prerequisite DTO for prerequisites
Section DTO for sections
CascadeInterface Lists pages, reads, updates and copies pages
LogUtility Delete old log files

27. Workforce Training Course Pages
Execution
• Using 45 programs
• Retrieved 518 courses
• Retrieved 3422 sections
• Retrieved 202 prerequisites
• Created page course-7249
• Created 1 pages and updated 517 pages
• Deleted 0 pages
• Normal end took 32 minutes, 16.050 seconds

28. StructuredDataNode
Text
1. private static StructuredDataNode
CreateNode(String name, String value) {
2. def node = new StructuredDataNode()
3. node.type = StructuredDataType
4. .fromValue(StructuredDataType._text)
5. node.identifier = name
6. node.text = value?.trim() ? value : null
7. return node
8. }

29. StructuredDataNode
Checkbox
1. private static StructuredDataNode CreateNodeOfCheckbox(String name,
Boolean value) {
2. def final checkbox = '::CONTENT-XML-CHECKBOX::'
3. def node = new StructuredDataNode()
4. node.type = StructuredDataType.fromValue(StructuredDataType._text)
5. node.identifier = name
6. if (value) {
7. node.text = "${checkbox}Yes"
8. } else {
9. node.text = checkbox
10. }
11. return node
12. }

30. StructuredDataNode
HTML
1. private static StructuredDataNode CreateNodeHtml(String name,
String value) {
2. def node = new StructuredDataNode()
3. node.type = StructuredDataType
4. .fromValue(StructuredDataType._text)
5. node.identifier = name
6. if (value?.trim()) {
7. node.text = Jsoup.clean(value, Whitelist.basic())
8. } else {
9. node.text = null
10. }
11. return node
12. }

31. StructuredDataNodes
1. data += CreateNodeOfDate('updated', course.updated)
2. for (Prerequisite p in course.prerequisites) {
3. def prerequisite = []
4. prerequisite += CreateNodeOfInt('id', p.id)
5. prerequisite += CreateNode('code', p.code)
6. prerequisite += CreateNode('number', p.number)
7. prerequisite += CreateNode('name', p.name)
8. prerequisite += CreateNode('comment', p.comment)
9. data += CreateNodeOfNodes('prerequisites',
CreateNodes(prerequisite.toList()))
10. }

32. Resources
Books
• Groovy in Action by Dierk König, Guillaume
Laforge, Paul King and Cédric Champeau
• Programming Groovy 2: Dynamic Productivity
for the Java Developer (Pragmatic Bookshelf)
by Venkat Subramaniam
• Velocity: The Basics: Scripting with a $ here
and a # to do by James Johnson

33. Resources
Web
• http://groovy.codehaus.org/
• http://directory.apache.org/api/groovy-ldap.html
• http://www.gradle.org/
• http://www.jetbrains.com/idea/
• http://www.slf4j.org/
• http://logback.qos.ch/
• http://www.telerik.com/kendo-ui
• http://jsoup.org/
• http://jtds.sourceforge.net/
• https://github.com/hannonhill/Webservices-Java-
Sample-Project

34. Questions
• tom.wilkinson@tri-c.edu
• (216) 987-3666
• Github: https://github.com/Tri-C