“Time is what keeps everything from happening at once.”
— Ray Cummings
Welcome to installment #50 of this seemingly never-ending series! That’s a milestone to which we have never even come close on this site. But then, we have never taken on a project of this magnitude before, either. Still, you would think that we would have been done with this endeavor long before now. That’s the way these things go, though. When you strike out into the darkness with just a vague idea of where you want to go, you never really know where you will end up or how long it will take. There are those who would tell you, though, that it’s all about the journey, not the destination! Still, I try to stay focused on the destination. I think we are getting close.
Last time, we wrapped up the coding on our global UI Script that allowed us to repurpose the upload.do page for installing a version of an application. We never really tested it all the way through, though, so we should probably do that before we attempt to go any further. Just to back up a bit, the way that we try this thing out is to pull up a version record for an application and click on the Install button that we added a few episodes back.
That should launch the upload.do page, and with the added URL parameter for the attachment sys_id, that should trigger our UI Script, which should then turn that page into this:
Meanwhile, the script should call back to the server for the Update Set XML file information, update the form on the page using that information, and then submit the form. After the form has been submitted, the natural process related to the upload.do page takes you here:
So, it looks like it all works, which is good. Unfortunately, the application has still not been installed. From here it is a manual process to first Preview the Update Set, and then Commit it. We don’t really want that to be a manual process, though, so let’s see what we can do to make that all happen without the operator having to click on anything or take any action to move things along. To begin, we should probably take a look how it is done manually, which should help guide us into how we might be able to do it programmatically. If you click on the Update Set in the above screen to bring up the details, you will see a form button, which is just another UI Action, called Preview Update Set.
Using the hamburger menu, we can select Configure -> UI Actions to pull up the list of UI Actions related to this form, and then select the Preview Update Set action and take a peek under the hood. It looks like all of the work is done on the client side with the following script:
function previewRemoteUpdateSet(control) {
var MESSAGE_KEY_DIALOG_TITLE = "Update Set Preview";
var MESSAGE_KEY_CLOSE_BUTTON = "Close";
var MESSAGE_KEY_CANCEL_BUTTON = "Cancel";
var MESSAGE_KEY_CONFIRMATION = "Confirmation";
var MESSAGE_KEY_CANCEL_CONFIRM_DIALOG_TILE = "Are you sure you want to cancel this update set preview?";
var map = new GwtMessage().getMessages([MESSAGE_KEY_DIALOG_TITLE, MESSAGE_KEY_CLOSE_BUTTON, MESSAGE_KEY_CANCEL_BUTTON, MESSAGE_KEY_CONFIRMATION, MESSAGE_KEY_CANCEL_CONFIRM_DIALOG_TILE]);
var sysId = typeof g_form != 'undefined' && g_form != null ? g_form.getUniqueValue() : null;
var dialogClass = window.GlideModal ? GlideModal : GlideDialogWindow;
var dd = new dialogClass("hierarchical_progress_viewer", false, "40em", "10.5em");
dd.setTitle(map[MESSAGE_KEY_DIALOG_TITLE]);
dd.setPreference('sysparm_ajax_processor', 'UpdateSetPreviewAjax');
dd.setPreference('sysparm_ajax_processor_function', 'preview');
dd.setPreference('sysparm_ajax_processor_sys_id', sysId);
dd.setPreference('sysparm_renderer_expanded_levels', '0'); // collapsed root node by default
dd.setPreference('sysparm_renderer_hide_drill_down', true);
dd.setPreference('focusTrap', true);
dd.setPreference('sysparm_button_close', map["Close"]);
// response from UpdateSetPreviewAjax.previewAgain is the progress worker id
dd.on("executionStarted", function(response) {
var trackerId = response.responseXML.documentElement.getAttribute("answer");
var cancelBtn = new Element("button", {
'id': 'sysparm_button_cancel',
'type': 'button',
'class': 'btn btn-default',
'style': 'margin-left: 5px; float:right;'
}).update(map[MESSAGE_KEY_CANCEL_BUTTON]);
cancelBtn.onclick = function() {
var dialog = new GlideModal('glide_modal_confirm', true, 300);
dialog.setTitle(map[MESSAGE_KEY_CONFIRMATION]);
dialog.setPreference('body', map[MESSAGE_KEY_CANCEL_CONFIRM_DIALOG_TILE]);
dialog.setPreference('focusTrap', true);
dialog.setPreference('callbackParam', trackerId);
dialog.setPreference('defaultButton', 'ok_button');
dialog.setPreference('onPromptComplete', function(param) {
var cancelBtn2 = $("sysparm_button_cancel");
if (cancelBtn2)
cancelBtn2.disable();
var ajaxHelper = new GlideAjax('UpdateSetPreviewAjax');
ajaxHelper.addParam('sysparm_ajax_processor_function', 'cancelPreview');
ajaxHelper.addParam('sysparm_ajax_processor_tracker_id', param);
ajaxHelper.getXMLAnswer(_handleCancelPreviewResponse);
});
dialog.render();
dialog.on("bodyrendered", function() {
var okBtn = $("ok_button");
if (okBtn) {
okBtn.className += " btn-destructive";
}
});
};
var _handleCancelPreviewResponse = function(answer) {
var cancelBtn = $("sysparm_button_cancel");
if (cancelBtn)
cancelBtn.remove();
};
var buttonsPanel = $("buttonsPanel");
if (buttonsPanel)
buttonsPanel.appendChild(cancelBtn);
});
dd.on("executionComplete", function(trackerObj) {
var cancelBtn = $("sysparm_button_cancel");
if (cancelBtn)
cancelBtn.remove();
var closeBtn = $("sysparm_button_close");
if (closeBtn) {
closeBtn.onclick = function() {
dd.destroy();
};
}
});
dd.on("beforeclose", function() {
reloadWindow(window);
});
dd.render();
}
I’m not going to attempt to pretend that I understand all that is going on here. I will say, though, that it looks to me as if we could steal this entire script and launch it from a location of our own choosing without having to have the operator click on any buttons. The one line that I see that would need to be modified is the one that gets the sys_id of the Update Set.
var sysId = typeof g_form != 'undefined' && g_form != null ? g_form.getUniqueValue() : null;
I think to start with, I would just delete that line entirely and pass the sys_id in as an argument to the function. Right now, a variable called control is passed in to the function, but I don’t see where that is used anywhere, so I think that I would just change this:
function previewRemoteUpdateSet(control) {
… to this:
function previewRemoteUpdateSet(sysId) {
… and see where that might take us. Maybe that will work and maybe it won’t, but you never know until you try. Of course, not everyone is a big proponent of that Let’s pull the lever and see what happens approach; once I was told that the last words spoken on Earth will be something like “Gee, I wonder what this button does.” Still, it’s just my nature to try things and see how it all turns out. But first we have to figure out where we can put our stolen script.
I can see two ways to go here: 1) we can just add it to our hack of the upload.do page and keep everything all in one place, or 2) since the upload.do page has done it’s job at this point and we don’t want to hack up a stock component any more than is absolutely necessary, let’s create a UI Page of our own and put the rest of the process in there where we can control everything and keep it within the scope of the application. There are, as usual, pros and cons for both approaches. I don’t know if one way is any better than the other, but we don’t have to decide right this minute. Let’s save that for our next installment.
