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Gis

Build status FOSSA Status

This document should explain some of the following for the GIS office app

  • how the production server is configured
  • what the config files do
  • how you might go about updating the server
  • how to build/test the application before updating the server
  • what technology is used

Server Setup

The server was configured following this guide https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/aspnet/core/publishing/linuxproduction?tabs=aspnetcore2x the application was installed in the /var/aspnetcore/gis folder on google cloud the office-asia machine

In that folder you'll find the binary files along with all the web files under the wwwroot folder, there's also a Log folder that has all the logs.

config files

2 files of interest are the 2 configuration files

  1. appsettings.json

    • BaseURL, this is used when generating emails links
    • ConnectionString is how we connect to the database
    • JWTSettings these are used for authentication
      • SecretKey if this is changed then any existing logins will get invalidated and everyone will be forced to log in again,
      • Issuer and Audience are unimportant, they're just labels, again if they change logging in again is required
    • GoogleAPIKey this is the key we use to access things like google drive, etc
    • SentryDNS this is the key of sorts that lets us post errors to the Sentry error reporting system
    • Environment mostly informational, used for error reports
    • SendGridAPIKey allows us to send email using sendgrid
    • TemplateSettings, each of these are the SendGrid template id's used when sending notification emails, they'll have to be changed to a new SendGrid account (see below)

  2. client_id.json this file is auto-generated for Google OAuth, just click download from the Google OAuth screen to get this file, OAuth is what allows the application to do google logins

Database

The Postgres database also lives on this machine, there's no special configuration done with it, if you need to connect to it externally you'll want to modify the allow-postgres firewall rule in google cloud to allow connections directly. Connection information can be taken from the appsettings.json file ConnectionString property you can read up on other options at Npgsql

If you need to interact with the database directly, modify the firewall settings, and use an application like DBForge, take the connection info from the connection string (replace hostname with the domain used to access the site).

To Actually make changes or query the database you'll need to learn SQL you can find a decent tutorial at w3schools

Helpful commands

  • reboot GIS application sudo service kestrel-gis restart
  • update config file sudo nano /var/aspnetcore/gis/appsettings.json to close press ctrl + x, the text editor is called nano search google for more help on how to use it

Build Info

The following will explain how to build the application (take the source code, and turn it into a usable application) on your computer, and then deploy to the production server, alternatively, you could run the application on your own computer to test out changes

Souce code can be found at github Build setup can be found here VSTS

First, you'll need to install the following, a quick google search should help you try and get around the minor version, if it's too much trouble then just get the same major version.

  • .net core 2.1.1
  • nodejs 9.2.0 (includes npm 5.5.1)

Once you've done this ensure you can access dotnet and npm from the command line. If you get an error that it's not installed or recognized then you might need to restart as those 2 apps should both be in your path and accessible from anywhere in the command line.

Once these are both installed you'll need to do the following:

  • build the frontend
  • build the backend
  • copy the frontend resources to the back end
  • publish the backend

there's a script that will do this all for you on windows called build.bat just make sure nodejs and .net core are installed first or you might get errors.

Deploy to Server

once you've run the build script (it might take a couple minutes) there should be a folder called website this will contain a full copy of the site, I recommend zipping it up and copying it to the server, after that connect to the server via SSH and extract the zip file like so:

unzip -o website.zip -d /var/aspnetcore/gis/
sudo service kestrel-gis restart

the first command extracts the files to where they need to go the second command restarts the server so it'll use the new files.

Running locally

you might want to run the server locally so you can test out a change.

the first thing you need to do is copy over the appsettings.json and client_id.json files from the server to your local computer put them in the Backend folder. Note, you'll need to update the connection string setting to point at the database running on the server, this will require access from your machine so update the google cloud firewall as appropriate and change the host in the connection string to the domain name of the office server.

Now open a command prompt in the Backend folder and run dotnet run once it starts up it should say it's now listening on http://localhost:1650 (if not update Frontend/proxy.config.json and replace the above URL with the one output by the command), but don't go there just yet.

Next, open a command prompt in the Frontend folder and run npm start, once it's started it should tell you that you can go to http://localhost:4201 to view the site. You'll be prompted to log in as usual. If the google login doesn't work you might need to change URL and domain authorization for API keys and OAuth client ids.

Email sending

Email is sent using SendGrid, there's very little setup required however, if access is lost to the Sendgrid account that's been configured then a new one will need to be made and an update will have to be made to the application (this might change in the future).

Email Templates

SendGrid works using transactional templates. If you need to configure a template, you go to their website, configure a template and the template will have an ID. I've made a couple templates already and put the ID into the config file. That way, when an email needs to be sent, I send the template ID to SendGrid and it knows what email template I'd like to use. These ID's are unique to the account. If a different SendGrid account is used, then the ID's will be different and need to be updated.

If you need to modify the template for an email, you should be able to login to the SendGrid site and find the template. The templates work using text substitutions, in the template they might look like some of the following:

  • :firstName
  • :type
  • :start
  • :end

When an email is sent the substitutions are replaced with the values specified in the application. Below is an example of what that might look like.

Email Template Example 1

Substitutions:

{
    {":name", "Kevin"},
    {":date", "March 31st 2018"}
}

Template:

Hi :name, today is :date

Email sent:

Hi Kevin, today is March 31st 2018
Modfy subsitutions

If a template is modified and a new substitution is required, then a bit of coding will need to be done. At the time of writing, all email templates are sent from Backend/Services/LeaveService.cs and you can find the substitutions by searching for $LEAVE-SUBSTITUTIONS$

Let's look at modifying a RequestLeaveApproval template to include the date that the Leave Request was created.

Take a look at this code; lines 183 through 205 should be highlighted. This is the SendRequestApproval function. Here we're making a substitution list and sending it to SendGrid, specifying that we want to send a RequestLeaveApproval template, along with a few other things, like sender email, destination email, and subject.

Taking a look at the substitutions you can see that the start and end date are coming from the leaveRequest, using the leaveRequest.StartDate or leaveRequest.EndDate properties. We want to access the date the Leave Request was created, so let's find where the StartDate and EndDate are defined, then find the name of the created date. If we search for a file called leaveRequest.cs we should find this and at line 23 we can see StartDate with EndDate right below. If we look down to line 38 we see CreatedDate property. Back in the SendRequestApproval function, we can use this property on the leave request. This might look like the following:

{":created", leaveRequest.CreatedDate.ToString("MMM d yyyy")}

Note the bit on the end that we're calling .ToString("MMM d yyyy"). This formats the date into text. Here you can read up on the supported formats if those need to be modified.

Next, you'll want to build the application and update the server with the new version. You should do this before you update the SendGrid template. Otherwise, an email might get sent without the substitution being replaced.

Finally, you'll want to update the template on SendGrid to use the :created substitution to display the created date.

Replace the SendGrid account

If for some reason you've lost access to the SendGrid account, you'll need to update the config file on the server to use the new account.

  1. Create a new SendGrid Account
  2. Create an API key with access to send emails
  3. Update appsettings.json SendGridAPIKey with API key
  4. Create template emails (example) for
    • HR notification
    • Request Leave approval
    • Leave Request notification (to let supervisors know of leave when they don't approve it)
  5. Update appsettings.json TemplateSettings with appropriate template ID's
  6. Reboot the GIS application sudo service kestrel-gis restart

Tech used

License

FOSSA Status