IBM® Rational® ProjectConsole, part of the IBM Rational Team Unifying Platform, is a Web-based project management tool that automates reporting on project status and progress. It gathers data from a variety of sources and automatically generates HTML reports containing charts that display trends or distributions. Its interactive Dashboard lets users create charts for inclusion in the HTML reports and dynamically analyze these charts through drill-downs. The Dashboard is normally accessible to all users, but you may want to restrict its access to users in the Administrator group. This article explains why and shows you how.
Why would you want to restrict access?
The Dashboard is a Java applet and as such requires a specific version of the Java Runtime Environment (Sun Distribution, Version 1.3.1 or above, although Versions 1.4.0 or 1.4.1 are recommended, depending on the operating system of the machine used to view data). Downloading a version of the JRE to a computer that already has another version installed can cause conflicts with applications that have dependencies on specific JRE versions. Thus, some users might not want to run the Dashboard applet.
ProjectConsole's user management makes a distinction between users in the Administrator group and everyone else. You can avoid the JRE conflict by restricting access to the Dashboard to users in the Administrator group and taking advantage of ProjectConsole's static HTML report generation capabilities. Users outside the Administrator group can take a quick glance at a project's status in the ProjectConsole Web site's main view without ever launching the Dashboard, provided that the generated HTML reports are properly configured.
When a ProjectConsole Administrator logs on, the control bar in the Web site's main view looks like Figure 1.
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| Figure 1: ProjectConsole's control bar when an Administrator logs on |
When a user outside the Administrator group logs on, the control bar looks like Figure 2.
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| Figure 2: ProjectConsole's control bar when a non-Administrator logs on |
You restrict access by removing the Dashboard button from the non-Administrator control bar. The content of this bar is controlled by an XSL style sheet in a file called banner.xsl stored on the ProjectConsole server in <Install Dir>\Common\rwp\webapps\projectconsole\pjc. By default, <Install Dir> is C:\Program Files\Rational.
The XSL code has one conditional statement that controls which buttons display in the control bar -- <xsl:when test="appRoot/oa">, in the segment that starts with <xsl:choose>, as shown in Listing 1. The code that follows this conditional statement is to be applied only when the logged-on user is a ProjectConsole Administrator, as indicated by the value of the XSL test being "appRoot/oa." In the original banner.xsl file, the conditional statement is placed after the code launching and defining the Dashboard button. (Note that the code in Listings 1 and 2 has been manually formatted for readability. The actual banner.xsl file may be formatted differently.)
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| Listing 1: Excerpt from the banner.xsl file showing the original placement of the <xsl:choose> segment |
To remove the Dashboard button from the non-Administrator control bar, you'll move the <xsl:choose> and <xsl:when testÂ…> lines to precede the group of five <td> tags that define the looks of the Dashboard button and launch the Dashboard. This will indicate that the Dashboard button is to be displayed only if the user is an Admininstrator. The resulting code will look like Listing 2.
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| Listing 2: Excerpt from the banner.xsl file showing the modified placement of the <xsl:choose> segment |
Now that you understand what you'll be doing, follow these steps to modify the XSL style sheet in order to remove the Dashboard button for non-Administrators:
- Copy the banner.xsl file and store it elsewhere as a backup copy just in case you need to restore it. Alternatively, you can rename this file and leave it in the same directory for easy access. Because making changes to the installed ProjectConsole XSL files isn't supported by IBM, this is by far the most important step.
- Using a text editor, copy the entire contents of the original file into a new one and save it as banner.xsl.
- Cut the
<xsl:choose>and<xsl:when test=" appRoot/oa">lines from their present location and insert them after the </td> tag that follows the line User Profile. - Save the file. Make sure it's saved at the location of the original file and has the same name (C:\Program Files\Rational\Common\rwp\webapps\projectconsole\pjc\xsl\banner.xsl).
- Optionally open the file in Internet Explorer to ensure that all of the tags are properly formed and there are no accidental errors in syntax.
- Stop these six Windows services: Rational ProjectConsole Collection Server, Rational ProjectConsole Dashboard Server, Rational ProjectConsole Report Server, and the Rational Web Platform HTTP server, ReqWeb servlet engine, and servlet engine.
- Start the same six services.
After you make these changes, all non-Administrator users who log on will see the control bar shown in Figure 3. Note that the Dashboard button doesn't appear on the bar.
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| Figure 3: The control bar for non-Administrators after customization |
There won't be any change in how the control bar appears to Administrator users.
Only users in the Administrator group will have access to the Dashboard after this customization. Therefore, it's extremely important for Administrators to create and publish all charts necessary for the HTML reports in the ProjectConsole main view. Furthermore, I would recommend that you set up each chart to be published on a schedule so that charts in the HTML reports contain the latest collected data. You can do this by right-clicking a Metrics Panel in the Dashboard and selecting the context menu item Publish on Schedule.
To reverse the effects of this customization, simply restore the original banner.xsl file.
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