Chapter 8. Administration and Configuration

KonaKart includes a sophisticated browser based administration application. It uses AJAX technology to provide a snappy user interface while the maintaining the advantages of running the application from a browser. Each application window has an on-line help facility which is the first place to look in order to understand the available functionality.

It incorporates a security subsystem with role based security. Each user can be assigned one or more roles that determine access to the available functionality with read / insert / edit and delete granularity. The user name / password based access, has the facility to block users for a programmable period after a number of unsuccessful login attempts.

Auditing may be enabled for all Admin App API calls with two levels of detail. All audit data is stored in the KonaKart database and may be browsed and filtered through the Admin App.

The admin application is fully internationalized and can be translated via a message catalog. Each panel has an online help facility that explains the functionality available.

KonaKart Admin Application - Status View

Main Features

The main features of the admin app are:

Store status summary (i.e. number of orders, number of products etc.)
Store maintenance
- Create new stores
- Edit existing stores
- Change state of stores (i.e. enable / disable, maintenance mode)
- Delete stores
Maintenance of configuration variables
Product maintenance
- Product Category maintenance
- Product Option maintenance
- Product Manufacturer maintenance
- Product Tag Group and Tag maintenance
- Product Payment Schedule maintenance
- Product Review maintenance
- Product Custom Attribute Template and Custom Attribute maintenance
- Product Catalog maintenance
- Miscellaneous Item Type and Item maintenance
Installation and removal of modules (payment, shipping, order total and other modules)
Customer maintenance
- Send email
- Role maintenance
- Reset Password
- Login to eCommerce application on behalf of a customer. Useful for call center applications.
- Customer Group maintenance
- Customer review maintenance
- Customer booking maintenance
Orders
- Generate invoice (template based)
- Generate packing slip (template based)
- Change state of order and send email
- View all payment gateway notifications associated with order
- Manage returns
Marketing
- Promotion maintenance
- Coupon maintenance
- Customer Tag and Expression maintenance
- Customer Communications where you can send template based eMails to all customers, to all customers who have requested to receive the newsletter, to customers that have asked to be notified about any updates for a particular product and to customers belonging to a particular group or satisying a certain expression.
Locations / Taxes
- Country maintenance>
- Zone maintenance
- Tax Area maintenance
- Tax Class maintenance
- Tax Rate maintenance
Localizations
- Currency maintenance
- Language maintenance
- Message maintenance
- Order Status maintenance
- Address Format maintenance
Reports
View Audit Data
Tools
- Delete expired sessions
- Refresh caches
- Manage SOLR search engine
- Publish products to Google Base
Custom panels - Add custom panels that implement your custom business logic.

Reporting

The KonaKart admin application provides powerful reporting functionality through integration with BIRT , the very popular open source Business Intelligence and Reporting Tool. Although an ever expanding list of useful reports is provided in the KonaKart download, the integration is done in such a way that allows users and system integrators to develop and customize their own reports by using the BIRT Eclipse based development environment.

Reporting - BIRT Viewer Security

By default the BIRT Viewer webapp is protected by a configurable layer of security that ensures that only suitably-authorised Administrators with active sessions are permitted to execute the reports using the BIRT Viewer webapp.

To disable the security completely you can set the "securityEnabled" initialisation parameter to "false" in the birtviewer web.xml.

When security is enabled, a user is allowed access to the reports through BIRT viewer if and only if:

A valid sessionId is passed as a parameter to the birtviewer webapp. A valid sessionId is one that exists in the database for the specified user and store and that it hasn't expired.
The user has been granted access to run the reports through role-based security.

To be able to run the reports the user must be assigned a role that permits that user to execute the reports. This is defined on the privileges screen of the role-based security section of the Admin Application (Under Customers >> Maintain Roles).

The "custom1" flag must be unticked to allow the user to run the reports:

Reports Privileges

You can easily customise the pages that users are redirected to in the event of session expiry and unauthorised access. The URLs of the pages that are used are defined in the birtviewer webapp's web.xml file.

Role-based Security and Configuration

Many panels in the admin application may be configured to display or hide certain fields and buttons. The configuration is set by selecting a role in the Maintain Roles panel and then by clicking on the Privileges button on the same panel. A pop-up panel should appear similar to the image shown below:

Role Privileges

Each panel has a number of checkboxes to assign privileges. The standard privileges are Insert, Edit and Delete, although some panels have custom privileges which are highlighted in green. In order to understand what a green highlighted checkbox refers to, a yellow popup will appear when you move your mouse over it. For example the Edit Order panel has a couple of configuration options which are:

Enable the read and edit of credit card details.
Enable the read and edit of custom fields, order number and tracking number.

File-based Configuration

It is possible to configure the Admin Application on a global basis by defining certain properties in the konakartadmin_gwt.properties file (which can be found in the classes directory of the konakartadmin webapp).

The configurations you make in this file-based technique are for every user of the Admin App (deployed in the associated webapp) no matter what roles are defined for each user.

By default, the file-based configuration ("FBC") properties are commented out and as such have no effect. To enable them you need to uncomment the relevant line(s).

The supported configuration properties are defined in the konakartadmin_gwt.properties file and will be updated over time. Here is a sub-set of the currently-supported configuration options:


# -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
# Enterprise Feature
# File-based Configuration
# These settings make global changes to the Admin App for all users

#fbc.kk_panel_communications.hide_expression_selection      = true
#fbc.kk_panel_communications.hide_product_selection         = true

#fbc.kk_panel_editProduct.hide_attributes_tab               = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editProduct.hide_merchandising_tab            = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editProduct.hide_quantities_tab               = true

#fbc.kk_panel_editProduct.details.hide_custom_attr_template = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editProduct.downloads.hide_index_text         = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editProduct.prices.hide_tier_prices           = true

#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.address.hide_city                = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.address.hide_company             = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.address.hide_country             = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.address.hide_custom1             = true

#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.custom.hide_custom1              = true

#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.personal.hide_customerGroup      = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.personal.hide_dateOfBirth        = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.personal.hide_fax                = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.personal.hide_first_name         = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.personal.hide_gender             = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.personal.hide_last_name          = true

#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.hide_address_tab                 = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.hide_custom_tab                  = true
#fbc.kk_panel_editCustomer.hide_points_tab                  = true

#fbc.kk_panel_promRules.hide_categories                     = true
#fbc.kk_panel_promRules.hide_customerGroups                 = true
#fbc.kk_panel_promRules.hide_customers                      = true
#fbc.kk_panel_promRules.hide_expressions                    = true

#fbc.kk_panel_promotions.hide_requires_coupon               = true
#fbc.kk_panel_promotions.hide_max_usage                     = true

# Add colon-separated keywords to exclude these from view in the Rich Text Editor
# Supported Keywords:
#    fg   = foreground
#    bg   = background
#    size = size
#    font = font
#fbc.rich_text_editor_exclude                               = fg:bg:font:size

After uncommenting a property it is necessary to refresh the caches (you can do this from the Tools section of the Admin App) then refresh your browser so that the changes to the Admin App User interface will be enabled.

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