Indico Video Services
User Guide



Server Administrator





v0.1

Table of Contents

1. Introduction

2. Plug-in administration and configuration

2.1. Main tab

2.2. Collaboration tab

2.2.1. Active plugins

2.2.2. Collaboration settings and plug-in settings

2.2.3. Options

2.2.4. Actions

2.2.5. Important options and actions


Guide for Server Admin

1. Introduction

Welcome to the Video Services User Guide for the Indico Server Admin.

As an Indico Server Admin, you have rights to access and modify everything in Indico. Please look at the three following guides:

Besides the things mentioned above, there another section of Indico that you will be able to see: the plug-in administration and configuration pages.

2. Plug-in administration and configuration

Go to the Server Admin pages by clicking on Server admin menu entry in the Administration menu:

Figure 1. Administration Menu

In the left-hand section list, click on Plugins.

Figure 2. Server admin menu. Plugins entry is highlighted

You will arrive to a page with several tabs:

2.1. Main tab

In this tab you can perform actions that affect all plug-in types.

Figure 3. Plugins administration section.

As you know, in Indico's source code, plug-ins are inside the MaKaC/plugins folder. Information about the plug-ins is stored in the database (which plug-ins are currently active, for example), yet if we change the code of the plug-ins, we may need to create new objects in the database. For example, we may need to store an additional option (global value) for the EVO plug-in.

The button Reload All Manually will reload information from all of the plug-ins, regardless of their plug-in type, from their source code files into the DB. When reloading, if some objects are no longer in the source code file, they are still preserved in the DB (although not visible anymore), marked as non present. Also, the values of the objects are preserved. This button is useful when we are adding new objects or changing some of their attributes that do change when reloading.

The button Clear all info in DB is a real reset: all the information about the plug-ins in the DB will be erased, and then loaded again from the source code files. Values are lost and any object that is not in the source code files will also disappear.

Finally, the Reload all plugins every time you open / navigate ... option, if activated, means that every time you navigate through this interface, it will be as if the Reload button is pressed. It's useful to disable it for debugging.

2.2. Collaboration tab

In this tab you can perform actions that affect the Collaboration plug-ins.

Figure 4. Collaboration plugins administration and configuration tab.

The other tabs (Epayment, RoomBooking) have the same structure as this tab, but since this is a Video Services User Guide, we will only go into the details for this tab.

2.2.1. Active plugins

The first part of the page shows you a list of the plug-ins that are in the Indico source code. Exception: plug-ins that have been marked as ignored (ignore = True in their __init__.py file).

You can decide which plug-ins should be active:

Figure 5. Enabled and disabled plugins.



If a plug-in is not active, Indico users will not see anything related to it in any of the Indico pages, be it display, management, or Video Services Overview pages.

To toggle if a plug-in should be active or not, click on its name or the green / red icon.

Also, there is a Reload button on this page. This has the same effect as the Reload All Manually button from the Main tab, except it will only reload information for the Collaboration plug-ins.

After an Indico installation, plug-ins will not be active. This is desirable because you should configure their settings before activating them.

2.2.2. Collaboration settings and plug-in settings

Under the Active plugins section, you can change settings. These are separated into two categories.

Figure 6. Subtabs for each of the plugins

There are two kinds of settings: Options and Actions

2.2.3. Options

Options are objects in the database that hold a value. The value can be of many types, and depending on the type of value, what will appear in the page will be different:

Figure 7. Example of a string option.

Figure 8. Example of a list of users option

Figure 9. Example of a list of rooms option

Once you edit an option, you need to press the Save button to send the changes to the server. Exception: the options of type User List and Room List, where every time you add or remove a user or room, information is sent to the server.

As you may have noticed in the screenshot of the whole Collaboration tab, some of the options are not actually editable. This means you can see the value but not change it; Actions will change them or you need to change its value in the source code and reload.



If you go to the options.py file of a given plugin folder (or the Collaboration folder, for the global Collaboration options), you will notice that options have several attributes, besides their description, type of value, and the initial value:

2.2.4. Actions

Actions are code that can be executed from the settings page. Often, the goal of this code is to update one of the values of the the options. Other times, they can execute some maintenance code.

Actions will appear as buttons that you can press. You will be able to find the executed code in the file actions.py inside the Collaboration folder or inside the folder of the respective.

2.2.5. Important options and actions

Here is the meaning of some options and actions that you should know about: