OIE Progress, and lots of it.

The workflow engine [OIE] in the OpenGroupware Coils project has reached a point a general usefulness.  OIE is accessible via WebDAV for creating, browsing, and starting flows.  The engine compiles BPML 1.0 markup to an internal format (adding additional markup-notations, such as XPDL,  shouldn't be much harder than writing a SaX parser to produce the internal format).  The foreach flow control structure is implemented;  switch, until, and while are simply stubs at this point.  switch is actually compiled but can't be executed yet.  Message scope is handled correctly.  Even with just linear execution and foreach a great many business processes can be modelled, especially ETL type flows.

The actions implemented so far are:

• read - Translate a message using a format; fixed record length and XLS formats have been implemented.
• select - SELECT from a defined RDBMS.
• write - Write a StandardXML message out using a specified format.
• assign - XPath select a value or assign a static value to a message.
• getEntity - Retrieve an entity from the groupware database.
• xpath - Create a new message from an XPath query.
• ldapSearch - Search an LDAP DSA, results are in DSMLv1.0.
• regularExpressionFind - Perform regexp matches.
• readJSON - Translate JSON data into XML.
• sendMail - Send a message via an SMTP server, including support for attachments.

All commands support label substitution in appropriate parameters.

As of yesterday there is also an insert action for inserting data into a RDMS table;  this action hasn't yet been as heavily tested as the others,  but it completes the tool set required for simple ETL flows.

Disabling GNOME Automount

When you connect a mass storage device to a computer running the GNOME desktop environment it automatically mounts the device in /media and places a short-cut to the device on your desktop.  This is an excellent default behavior;  but if you are working with various devices sometimes it can get in the way.  To correctly disable this feature simply execute:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount false

The devices will still appear in computer:/// (in nautilus) where you can right click on them to select the mount action if and when you want them to be mounted.  If and when you want to re-enable to auto-mounting feature execute:

gconftool-2 --type bool --set /apps/nautilus/preferences/media_automount true