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Configure

Application settings

Info

The global application settings are found in the application.settings file at the root of the WEB-INF\classes folder. Changes are taken into account when the Tomcat Extract application is restarted.

application.external.url
URL to access the application. This value is used to generate links in notification e-mails.

database.encryption.secret
Random 32-character ISO-8859-1 string used as key to encrypt certain database values.

database.encryption.salt
Random 32-character ISO-8859-1 string used as "salt" to encrypt certain database values.

email.templates.cache
Boolean value defining whether email notification templates should be cached.

email.templates.encoding
Encoding used by email notification templates

email.templates.path
Relative path to directory containing email notification templates. If the path is relative to the WEB-INF/classes directory, it must be prefixed with classpath:/.

extract.i18n.language
Language ISO code used by the application. A single code means the application is in monolingual mode. Several codes separated by comma means the application is in multilingual mode (language set in users preferences). In multilingual mode, the first one acts as the default language (e.g. for fallback, creation of first user, etc.). Here are a couple of examples:

  • extract.i18n.language=fr Extract is in french
  • extract.i18n.language=de Extract is in german
  • extract.i18n.language=fr,de Extract is in french and german, french being the default language

All codes must have corresponding application's language files (usually messages.properties, messages.js and *Help.html) under WEB-INF/classes, WEB-INF/classes/static/lang and in all plugin lang directory. If this is not the case, you can add a new language (see Add a new language section).

By default, Extract supports french (fr) and german (de).

check.authenticity
Boolean value defining if the signature of executable binaries run by Extract are checked or not. By default, the value is true check.authenticity=true but you can set it on false (it's known to cause antivirus alerts when set to true).

http.proxyHost
Server name to be used as proxy for external connections. This property can be omitted if no proxy is used.

http.proxyPassword
Password used to log in to the proxy server. This property can be omitted if no proxy is used or if it does not require authentication.

http.proxyPort
HTTP port of proxy server. This property can be omitted if no proxy is used.

http.proxyUser
Username used to log in to the proxy server. This property can be omitted if no proxy is used or if it does not require authentication.

ldap.attributes.fullname
LDAP attribute name containing the user's full name (e.g. John Doe).

ldap.attributes.login
LDAP attribute name containing the user's identifier, to be typed into the login form ( e.g. jdoe).

ldap.attributes.mail
LDAP attribute name containing the user's e-mail address.

ldap.user.objectclass
LDAP object class to which users must belong.

logging.config
Path to file containing application log configuration. If the path is relative to the application's WEB-INF/classes directory, it must be prefixed with classpath:/.

spring.batch.jdbc.initialize-schema
String defining whether the Spring Batch initializer should be started. This value must be set to never in order to avoid creating unused tables in the database.

spring.batch.job.enabled
Boolean value defining whether scheduled tasks should be started automatically by Spring Batch. Must be set to false. (These tasks are started by the application.)

spring.datasource.driver-class-name
Qualified name of the database driver class to be used.

spring.datasource.password
Database login password.

spring.datasource.url
JDBC database connection string.

spring.datasource.username
Database login username

spring.servlet.multipart.max-file-size
Maximum size of each file that can be uploaded to the application. If you receive a 500 error when adding a large file to a request folder, it may be useful to increase this value, remembering to also increase spring.servlet.multipart.max-request-size if necessary.

spring.servlet.multipart.max-request-size
Maximum size of an upload request. This value must be greater than or equal to that of spring.servlet.multipart.max-file-size.

spring.jpa.database-platform
Qualified name of the dialect class to be used to communicate with the database.

spring.jpa.hibernate.ddl-auto
Value defining the application's behaviour with regard to database architecture. By default, this property is set to update, which allows tables to be generated automatically when the application is first started. Subsequently, you can speed up application start-up by setting this value to none. In this case, if a table or column has been accidentally deleted, it will not be automatically recreated, which may lead to operating problems. It is also recommended to set this value back to update when installing a new version of Extract, so that any database modifications can be applied.

spring.jpa.properties.hibernate.id.new_generator_mappings
Boolean value defining whether to use the latest ID generator version for database entries. Must be set to true.

spring.jpa.show-sql
Boolean value defining whether to display SQL generated by the application (e.g. in logs). We strongly advise you to leave this value at false.

spring.thymeleaf.cache
Boolean value defining whether the application's pages templates should be cached.

spring.thymeleaf.enabled
Boolean value defining whether to enable the templating engine. Must be set to true.

spring.thymeleaf.encoding
Encoding used by the application's pages templates.

spring.thymeleaf.mode
Template type used for application pages. Must be set to HTML.

spring.thymeleaf.prefix
Path to directory containing application page templates. If the path is relative to the application's WEB-INF/classes directory, it must be prefixed with classpath:/.

spring.thymeleaf.suffix
Application page templates extension.

spring.thymeleaf.template-resolver-order
Templating engine priority for resolving application page templates. Must be set to 1.

table.page.size
Number of lines to display in tables using pagination.

Logging

Info

The logging application settings are found in the logback-spring.xml file at the root of the WEB-INF\classes folder. They define what information should be written to the application logs. Changes are taken into account when the Tomcat Extract application is restarted.

The setup takes place in two steps:

  1. The setting of an appender, i.e. a location to which to send the information to be logged, and the format of this information. This can be a file, a database, a console, etc.

  2. The setting of a logger. A logger serves as the connection between a specific part of an application and one or more predefined appenders. A logger can simultaneously use multiple appenders, and a single appender can be shared by multiple loggers. The logger is identified by a name, corresponding to the package from which the class messages originate, encompassing any of its sub-packages. Additionally, the logger specifies a minimum level of messages to be logged. The root logger provides default logging behavior for all application classes, including dependencies.

For more detailed information, please refer to the Logback help.

Tomcat user access rights

Since Extract is a Tomcat application, it relies on the user running the Tomcat service to access various resources (network shares, local folders, etc.). It is therefore recommended to run the Tomcat service with an account having access to the necessary resources.

Changing the Tomcat user (Windows)

  1. Open the Tomcat monitor (tomcat8w.exe, or Start Menu > All Programs > Apache Tomcat > Configure Tomcat)
  2. Go to the Log On tab
  3. Check the This account option
  4. Edit the desired account information
  5. Click on OK
  6. Restart the Tomcat service

Changing the Tomcat user (Linux)

  1. Edit the /etc/systemd/system/tomcat9.service file
  2. In the Service category, change the values of the User and Group keys to the user's name and group respectively.
  3. Save the file
  4. Restart the Tomcat service

Warning

The name of the file, its location and even the entire procedure may differ depending on the distribution used, the version of Tomcat and its installation mode.

Tomcat default locale

In emails sent by Tomcat, dates are formatted according to Tomcat's locale. To set this, use the Duser.language and Duser.region parameters. For example : 

-Duser.language=fr -Duser.region=CH

These parameters are defined in the same way as for heap size (see Heap Size).

Optimizing

Heap size

The FME Desktop scripts run by Extract can lead to heavy heap usage. If you are using this plugin, it is recommended that you set the starting size of the heap (parameter Xms) to 1024 MB and the maximum size (parameter Xmx) to at least 2048 MB.

These parameters are set in the setenv.sh (Linux) or setenv.bat (Windows) file in Tomcat's bin directory.

If Tomcat is running as a Windows service, these parameters are defined in the Java tab of the service properties. This tab can only be accessed via the Tomcat monitor (tomcat8w.exe, or Start Menu > All Programs > Apache Tomcat > Configure Tomcat). It is not visible via the Windows services management console (services.msc).

In all cases, Tomcat must be restarted for the changes to take effect.

Cache Size

During startup, the logs may report that an item failed to load due to insufficient cache size, for example:

24-May-2017 10:52:57.029 WARNING [https-jsse-nio-8443-exec-10] org.apache.catalina.webresources.Cache.getResource Unable to add the resource at [/WEB-INF/classes/static/bower_components/select2/docs/_sass/vendor/font-awesome/_variables.scss] to the cache for web application [/extract] because there was insufficient free space available after evicting expired cache entries - consider increasing the maximum size of the cache

In this case, you can increase the maximum cache size by modifying the context.xml file in Tomcat's conf directory :

<Context>
    <!-- ... -->

    <!-- Larger resources cache for EXTRACT -->
    <Resources cacheMaxSize="102400" />

    <!-- ... -->
</Context>

Rule field size limitation (matching processes)

Since the creation of text fields is problematic when handled solely with JPA (so that the application is not tied to a particular database system), It was decided to define the field that stores the rules linking requests to their corresponding processing as a VARCHAR data type. Unfortunately, this means limiting the number of characters in each rule to 65,000.

Using PostgreSQL, however, you can remove this limitation by manually changing the type of the rule field in the rules table. The SQL command to make this change is :

ALTER TABLE rules ALTER COLUMN rule TYPE TEXT

Field values of existing records are preserved.

Warning

There is no guarantee that a similar modification will work with another DBMS.