Repo for development of the P3 Workspace Service

SERVICE DEPENDENCIES: typecomp shock

SETUP

1. A mongodb instance must be up and running.
2. The connected Shock server must be up and running.
3. make
4. if you want to run tests: make test
5. make deploy
6. fill in deploy.cfg and set KB_DEPLOYMENT_CONFIG appropriately
7. /kb/deployment/services/Workspace/start_service

If the server doesn't start up correctly, check /var/log/syslog for debugging information.

UNAUTHENTICATED DOWNLOADS

The workspace service supports the creation of time-limited download URLs that do not require authentication to retrieve.

We have two forms of this; single-file download and archive download.

Single-file download is managed with a mongodb collection download_keys that maps from a download key (a long apparently random string) to a workspace object identifier. The workspace object must not be a folder (folders are managed using archive downloads).

The identifier is a random string. We use a base-64 representation of a UUID (shorter than the standard UUID hex representation).

The URL generated will have the filename of the source file after the random number:

   [base of service url]/download/<random>/<filename>

This will provide a hint as to what the file is, and will also help browsers generate the correct path when saving. We will also issue the approprate Content-Disposition header to trigger a save to disk with the correct filename.

The document stored in mongo is of the following form:

structure { download_key string; workspace_path string; expiration_time int; file_path string; shock_node string; user_token string; };

We use the collection named downloads to store these documents.

We use a secondary Dancer application hosted in a twiggy asynchonous server to serve the actual download documents. We use the AnyEvent infrastructure to allow multiple downlaods to be processed at once. It will also host a download data item garbage collection timer to purge the downloads collection of expired entries.