index.md

Application Registration Tool

This tool executable subproject is used to manage application registrations in the backend services, manually or under automation. The source code for the tool can be found here.

Push operation

The main operation is the push operation, invoked by calling dotnet SGL.Analytics.Backend.AppRegistrationTool push with a directory as the parameter. Additional appsettings.json-style config files (e.g. for database secrets) can be passed using --config arguments. In this mode, the tool enumerates all JSON files in a given directory and registers the applications described in these files in databases of both backend services. Each of the files is expected to contain a JSON version of a SGL.Analytics.Backend.Domain.Entity.ApplicationWithUserProperties object. An example for such a file is given below:

{
  "Name": "ExampleApp",
  "ApiToken": "<some token string used for identifying the app, can be generated using the generate-api-token verb of the tool>",
  "UserProperties": [
    {
      "Name": "Foo",
      "Type": "Integer",
      "Required": false
    },
    {
      "Name": "Bar",
      "Type": "String",
      "Required": false
    },
    {
      "Name": "Obj",
      "Type": "Json",
      "Required": false
    }
  ]
}

API Token Generation

The tool also provides a mode that simply generates an API token, that can be used when writing a new app description JSON files. This mode is activated by calling dotnet SGL.Analytics.Backend.AppRegistrationTool push and doesn't require a database connection or similar dependencies.

Automation Usage

The tool is (in containerized form) also used during docker-compose up of the backend to ensure registration of all apps that have their definition present in an appropriate bind-mount volume. This allows for easy application registration by just adding the app definition to the bound directory and triggering a docker-compose up. Populating this directory can be done manually or by a continuous deployment job.