[Freeipa-devel] Client-side command in the IPA framework

[Alexander Bokovoy]

On Fri, 28 Feb 2014, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
>On Fri, 2014-02-28 at 10:47 +0100, Petr Vobornik wrote:
>> On 28.2.2014 04:02, Rob Crittenden wrote:
>> > Alexander Bokovoy wrote:
>> >> On Thu, 27 Feb 2014, Nathaniel McCallum wrote:
>> >>> So the recent discussion on importing tokens led me to write a script to
>> >>> parse RFC 6030 xml files into IPA token data. This all works well. But
>> >>> now I need to integrate it into the IPA framework.
>> >>>
>> >>> This command will parse one or more xml files, creating a set of tokens
>> >>> to be added. Given that we already have otptoken-add on the server-side,
>> >>> it seems to me that all work needs to be done on the client-side. How do
>> >>> I create a new client-side command that calls existing server-side API?
>> >> subclass from frontend.Local, override run() or forward() method and
>> >> perform batch
>> >> operation of otptoken_add from there.
>> >>
>> >> See cli.help, for example.
>> >
>> > If you do an override, do forward() for cli-specific work.
>> >
>> > But you should do as little as possible for reasons you already stated:
>> > the UI. Anything you do in forward Petr will need to implement in the UI.
>> >
>> > Unfortunately we don't yet have a nice way to handle files. We have
>> > tickets open at https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/1225 and
>> > https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/2933
>> >
>> > If this file is something that would be pasted into a big text field
>> > then you can probably handle it in a similarly clumsy way that we do
>> > CSRs in the cert plugin.
>> >
>> > rob
>>
>> +1 for parsing it on server. Otherwise every client, not just CLI or Web
>> UI, would have to reimplement the same logic - having it on server will
>> support better integration with third party products.
>>
>> Parsing on client would be understandable if there was some middle step
>> which would require some action from user, i.e, pick only some tokens to
>> import.
>
>If we parse on the server side, how do we handle the long-running
>operation? Think of the case of importing hundreds or thousands of
>tokens...
Why then to do it as a IPA CLI command at all?
This is an administrative task which can be done with a separate
ipa-otp-import command, designated to run on IPA masters.

-- 
/ Alexander Bokovoy