“Do not be embarrassed by your failures; learn from them and start again.”
— Richard Branson
With the completion of the client side code, it is now time to turn our attention to a much bigger effort, all of the things that will need to go on over on the server side. This will involve a number of items beyond just the widget itself, but we can start with the widget and branch out from there. One thing that I know I will need for sure is a Script Include to house all of the various common routines, so I built out an empty shell of that, just to get things started.
var CollaborationStoreUtils = Class.create();
CollaborationStoreUtils.prototype = {
initialize: function() {
},
type: 'CollaborationStoreUtils'
};
That’s enough to reference the script in the widget, which we should do right out of the gate, along with gathering up a couple of our application’s properties and checking to make sure that the set-up process hasn’t already been completed:
var csu = new CollaborationStoreUtils();
data.registeredHost = gs.getProperty('x_11556_col_store.host_instance');
data.registeredHostName = gs.getProperty('x_11556_col_store.store_name');
var thisInstance = gs.getProperty('instance_name');
var mbrGR = new GlideRecord('x_11556_col_store_member_organization');
if (mbrGR.get('instance', thisInstance)) {
data.phase = 3;
}
We get the instance name from a stock system property (instance_name) and then see if we can fetch a record from the database for that instance. If we can, then the set-up process has already been completed, and we advance the phase to 3 to bring up the set-up completion screen. The next thing that we do is check for input, and if there is input, then we grab the data that we need coming in from the client side and check the input.action variable (c.data.action on the client side) to see what it is that we have been asked to do.
if (input) {
data.registeredHost = gs.getProperty('x_11556_col_store.host_instance');
data.registeredHostName = gs.getProperty('x_11556_col_store.store_name');
data.phase = input.phase;
data.instance_type = input.instance_type;
data.host_instance_id = input.host_instance_id;
data.store_name = input.store_name;
data.instance_name = input.instance_name;
data.email = input.email;
data.description = input.description;
data.validationError = false;
if (input.action == 'save') {
// save logic goes here ...
} else if (input.action == 'setup') {
// set-up logic goes here ...
}
}
That is the basic structure of the widget, but of course, the devil is in the details. Since the save process comes before the set-up process, we’ll take that one on first.
If you elected to set up a Host instance, then there is nothing more to do at this point other than to send out the email verification notice and advance the phase to 2 so that we can collect the value of the code that was sent out and entered by the user. However, if you elected to set up a Client instance, then we have a little bit of further work to do before we proceed. For one thing, we need to make sure that you did not specify your own instance name as the host instance, as you cannot be a client of your own host. Assuming that we passed that little check, the next thing that we need to do is to check to see if the host that you specified is, in fact, an actual Collaboration Store host. That will take a bit of REST API work, but for today, we will assume that there is a function in our Script Include that can make that call. To complete the save action, we can also assume that there is another Script Include function that handles the sending out of the Notification, which will allow us to wrap up the save action logic as far as the widget is concerned.
if (data.instance_type == 'client') {
if (data.host_instance_id == thisInstance) {
gs.addErrorMessage('You cannot specify your own instance as the host instance');
data.validationError = true;
} else {
var resp = csu.getStoreInfo(data.host_instance_id);
if (resp.responseCode == '200' && resp.name > '') {
data.store_name = resp.name;
data.store_info = resp.storeInfo.result.info;
} else {
gs.addErrorMessage(data.host_instance_id + ' is not a valid Collaboration Store instance');
data.validationError = true;
}
}
}
if (!data.validationError) {
data.oneTimeCode = csu.verifyInstanceEmail(data.email);
}
So now we have referenced two nonexistent Script Include functions to get through this section of code. We should build those out next, just to complete things, but neither one is an independent function. The getStoreInfo function needs to call a REST service, which also doesn’t exist, and the verifyInstanceEmail function needs to trigger a notification, which does not exist at this point, either. We should create those underlying services first, and make sure that they work, and then we can build the Script Include functions that invoke them to finish things up.
That seems like quite a bit of work in and of itself, so this looks like a good place to wrap things up for now. We can jump on that initial web service first thing next time out.
