eForms

I've updated the code on the demo site, which was getting pretty stale. There's a bunch of new stuff, including eform functionality, which is going to save sooo much work around here.  I wrote about it on the other blog here.

LDAP authentication

openIGOR is up and running at JCSU, and I have gotten LDAP to work with it, so there's a single login solution. That is, IGOR authenticates against the Windows Active Directory database. I also wrote a bulk upload program for users, so that a comma delimited file, from AD for example, can be easily uploaded into the Person table with the correct type.

Bug Fix in igor.pl

A couple of lines in igor.pl led to buggy behavior, in that sometimes data on the GUI wouldn't update properly, and the organizational tree wouldn't build correctly. Those have been fixed, and the new code package has the updated igor.pl.

Making Years Invisible

Recent changes include the addition of a configuration variable that allows the IE GUI year selector to be made invisible. You may want to do this if you don't want users to have the power to change to a different year, or to make the report seem not year-specific. A bug was fixed, and a helper function to clean up the database is in there too. The README file has the details.

New Image Available

I just uploaded the newest code with all the bug fixes to date. The latest one includes a modification to the GUI that allows commas to be used in group names. Before it was delimiting data items with commas, which would cause a problem. Note that special characters such as & and | should be avoided in unit names. So you may want to call it the @#%#^ Committee, but igor won't be able to parse that yet. The character translations between SQL and CGI are bothersome, and I'll nail it all down eventually. You may find other characters, like accent marks that don't work properly in some of the dialogs.

The GUI has been modified to fix the 'Add Subordinate Unit' drop-down. Now the drop-down box actually works like it should. Before, a long list would scroll off the screen so you couldn't use it.

Finally, the default graphics are correct in this package. I had put some custom ones in the last package by mistake.

Note that if you are upgrading, you want to preserve your config.pl. I do occasionally make changes to that file, but those will be easy to detect by inspection. No changes this time.

End of File Issues

If you install IGOR and get 'premature end of script headers' or something similar when you try to log in, make sure that the perl files (*.pl) are executable. Then run

./login.pl

to see if that works. If you get errors here, either the perl interpreter isn't at /usr/bin/perl, or you may have DOS end of line characters instead of unix ones on the files. This is easy to do when you use FTP. You can use

dos2unix *.pl
chmod a+x *.pl

to switch them over. That should fix it.

IE Database Bug Fix

The Actions and Improvements box on the IE interface has a bug in the database. The character limit is set to 45 instead of to TEXT. Here's the SQL to fix it.

ALTER TABLE `IGOR`.`IE_Objectives` MODIFY COLUMN `Improvements` TEXT CHARACTER SET latin1 COLLATE latin1_swedish_ci NOT NULL DEFAULT '';