Sungard SCT's ALM

This page is part of the Aggregated Layout Management Convergence 2.x effort that will be added to 3.x.

The original Aggregated Layout Management effort launched three years ago by, at that time, Campus Pipeline was originally called Distributed Layout Management or DLM. The intent of this page is to communicate the design, feature set, data, and object model of DLM to assist in determining which existing model should be used as the basis of a single future ALM codebase.

DLM

The definition of the fragments that are available in Luminis is determined at startup time by reading a configuration file known as dlm.xml. A Sample dlm.xml file is provide with examples and explanations on how to configure fragments. Because of the flexible nature of dlm.xml a related effort is underway to enhance the permissions infrastructure so that permissions support can be adhered to by the new ALM model as it materializes and support targeting fragments to users using arbitrarily simple or complex boolean logic constructs.

Only pushed fragments are currently available since regular accounts are used to define the layout for a fragment and there was no UI at the time for selecting from a list of fragments to which users can subscribe. However, there layout model can certainly supports pushed fragments.

The bulk of the DLM infrastructure is provided by Sungard SCT's RDBMDistributedLayoutStore class that is a subclass of RDBMUserLayoutStore. The layouts obtained for a user from this class differ in structure from traditional layouts as described in Sungard SCT's Layout DOM Model.

Layout fragment owners, accounts that a user can log into to edit the layout for a fragment, are presented with a different view of the Preferences page than are regular users. Example Fragment Layout Editing pages are shown here.

For regular users that receive layouts pushed into their layout their view of the Preferences page for editing their layout changes based on what restrictions have been specified by fragment owners. Example User Layout Editing pages are shown here.

It is important to note that restrictions placed on layouts by a fragment owner are portrayed in the user's view when they are editing their layouts. It is also important to note that a user can make modifications to fragments provided such changes are allowed by the fragment owner. Such changes are merged back in when the user next logs in. If such changes are ever restricted by a fragment owner then the merging algorithms will attempt to fulfill the user's changes as much as possible within the bounds set by the fragment owner. Example User Changes to Fragments are shown here.

User preference values are also supported in DLM. For example, column width can be specified by a fragment owner and locked so that it can't be overridden by users of the fragment. Furthermore, support for DLM Savvy Channels is provided so that channels can present different interfaces to fragment owners than they do to users of the fragments on which they reside if appropriate for the channel.

Since then Campus Pipeline was new to the uPortal community the DLM design took great pains to not cause schema changes to uPortal's database structure. The DLM Data Model and tables used thereby are outlined here. DLM did not require any changes to existing table structure for its support.

The key elements of DLM that would have to be migrated into whatever codebase results from the Aggregated Layout Management Convergence effort is outlined in DLM Migration Requirements. The existing user base should not lose functionality from this effort but rather benefit from many new features.