When we export a document (IQA query, business object, content, content type, etc.) today, if that document has custom permissions it will not import into a database that didn't already have that content with custom permissions.  This comes up in the following scenarios:

• Create a new query in Dev, set permissions, test, copy to production.
• Create a generic iPart with permissions, import to new clients.
• Modify the ACL for a query to include a new Role in Dev, then import to Test.
• Import new Nav items we've set up in Dev.

Beside all that, we often have to apply the same permissions over and over to multiple items.  Having our own predefined security sets would make this a lot simpler.  (It would also keep the Access* tables from growing excessively, since each "custom set" is assigned its own key.)

In the course of creating some components for iMIS, I find the need to have some additional settings, global to all my components running in this instance of iMIS, but independent of other instances.

In iMIS 10, I would tend to put these settings in System_Params or Gen_Tables, or sometimes create a UDT in Customizer.

The web.config in the Net folder comes to mind as one place I could put these.  It seems like a good idea, since I'll have to review that file when copying \Net from test to live anyway.

I can see (*cough* Reflector *cough*) that log4net is referenced many places through the iMIS app, and appears to be responsible for writing Asi.Webroot.log and possibly other files.

• Where can I find basic information for using log4net?
• Are there any code samples, or specific examples easily found in code?
• Is there an ASI wrapper for this, or do I need to invoke log4net directly?
• Is it possible for me to invoke log4net in a way that adds my entries to Asi.Webroot.log?
• Is it advisable to do so?  (That is, it won't cause concurrency problems with iMIS writing to it also.)

I'm assuming that my app would run inside the Net or iMIS_Public folder, and be a part of the same application space with iMIS.

I have the iMIS AsiMembershipProvider to a Sharepoint site as the default membership provider and it creates users correctly (as long as I provide it with a valid providerKey for an existing iMIS contact). However, it crashes with a cryptic null; reference exception when trying to validate.

As a work around, I inherited the AsiMembershipProvider and overrode the "ValidateUser" method by redirecting to the iMIS SOA membership web service "ValidateUser". This works and I can now log in. However, I would rather not add this service to my system architecture if I can help it. Why would the web service work when the AsiMembershipProvider doesn't.

I am looking for information in the PHP toolkit that Marty talked about during Innovations... is anything posted here?

(Initial, informal version; updated version to come.)

New in 15.1 is a standard class for resolving "variables" in a body of text. The class is Asi.VariableResolver (in Asi.dll). It's pretty simple; you give it a body of text, with variables (denoted by []) included, and pass it either a set of Name/Value pairs, a list of IAtom objects, or both, and it returns the text with all the matched variables replaced by their respective values.

Creating and Managing iMIS Groups in code

This article contains sample code and discussion of creating Groups via the iMIS .NET APIs.

Groups Overview

There are two kinds of groups in iMIS: Simple Groups and Detail Groups. Simple groups are, for lack of a better term, pretty simple: they are essentially a collection of contacts, each with a Join Date and (optional) Drop Date. Detail groups are similar to Simple Groups, but they add the concept of Roles; each Group Type can have a specific set of roles defined, and members within each group can have zero, one, or many roles within the group. Either group type can be used for iMIS security assignments.

Creating User Logins and Passwords in iMIS 15+

iMIS 15 introduced a new concept called Unified Login. Under unified login, all iMIS modules and applications use a single authentication store to allow users access. Currently, this store is based on the Microsoft Membership Provider model. There are several methods of interacting with the provider, from the database level all the way up to .NET APIs and Web Services. The various options are presented below.

Pages in this book deal with using/modifying the iMIS infrastructure (such as Unified Login).

When I saw the press release on the get Google Social Scene API I thought it sounded mildly interesting but not really compelling. Then I read this from a link on [url]http://www.simplebits.com[/url]: [url]http://bokardo.com/archives/why-im-excited-about-the-google-social-graph-api/[/url]. One of the annoying things about facebook, Myspace, linked-in, gmail, etc. is that all the contact/friend info is separate in each one other then facebook importing email contacts and the like.