Specifying custom settings in Config Files for Development

Why would one specify custom config file settings for development?

While developing on either the client side or the server side you might want to specify custom settings in the .config files for the client side and the server side.

For instance, you can change the DebugLevel, the IP Address/Port of your development PetraServerConsole instance, etc. Some of this things can be changed in your OpenPetra.build.config.

You can find other examples here that speed up the development/debugging/testing turnaround. Those changes need to be made in the config files of PetraClient or PetraServer.

Location of auto-generated configuration files - don't edit those

• The PetraClient application picks up its configuration file from the \etc\Client.config file.
• The PetraServerConsole application picks up its configuration file from the \etc\Server.config file.

However, these files get overwritten when nant startPetraServer or nant startPetraClient are run!!!

To avoid loosing your changes to these files you need to make the changes to the appropriate .config file in the template of that file, or to OpenPetra.build.config!

Location of template configuration files

The folder \inc\template\etc\ contains one file for the client configuration, Client.config and several config files for the server configuration, named Server-mysql.config, Server-postgresql.config and Server-sqlite.config. Determine the correct server .config file by choosing the one that relates to the RDBMS you are currently using for development.

Creating custom .config files

• Follow the instructions here to create your custom .config files that contain your changes.
• You could run nant initConfigFiles to see the effect of your changes, but startPetraServer and startPetraClient will run initConfigFiles anyway each time.
• Run nant startPetraServer and/or nant startPetraClient to start the appropriate application with the .config file changes applied.

Modify settings in OpenPetra.build.config

You can overwrite all default settings from inc\nant\OpenPetra.common.xml.

For example you find these lines in OpenPetra.common.xml:

<property name="Server.Port" value="9000" 
         overwrite="false" />
<property name="Server.DebugLevel" value="0" 
         overwrite="false" />

This means, you can overwrite these values in your OpenPetra.build.config:

<property name="Server.Port" value="9300"/>
<property name="Server.DebugLevel" value="5"/>

See also User defined configuration parameters with OpenPetra.build.config

All those values are applied to the config files for the PetraServer and the PetraClient automatically each time when they are started. Those values are also applied to the .my config files, if you keep the variable names in there, eg. ${Server.DebugLevel}