Extracting active logged-in users and active authentication tickets from Alfresco

[abhinavmishra14]

Sometimes an Alfresco Administrator might need to track active logged-in users in the system for audit purpose or for planning maintenance activities. There can be many other use-cases depending of type of usage or organization policies.

Alfresco doesn't provide this kind of feature for admins out of the box as of now. However Alfresco 5.2 version on-wards they are providing Support Tools feature which can provide various options including this particular use-case.

Support Tools is an Add-On, which is available on GitHub called alfresco-support-tools which can be installed as a module as well. It seems Alfresco 5.2 on-wards alfresco has integrated this add-on OOTB. I have not tried this add-on so not sure how it works. However the screenshots given at add-on page shows that it has good amount of features which is really useful for admins.

See here: Support Tools

Here we are going to use Alfresco's TicketComponent service to get the active user details and active ticket details.
We will create a java backed web-script which will return the basic details about the active users, total active user count, total no. of active tickets etc.

Follow the below given steps:

1-      Create alfresco webscript descriptor “getActiveUsers.get.desc.xml”

<webscript>

  <shortname>Active Users</shortname>

   <description>This webscript returns the active users logged-in into Alfresco.

Sample response:

  {

  activeTicketsCount: 2,

  activeUsers: "["admin","abhinav@gmail.com "]",

  activeUsersCount: 2,

  _comment: "Active user count may be lower than the ticket count, since a user can have more than one ticket/session. Ticket count may be higher than the active user count, since a user can have more than one ticket/session."

}

  </description>

  <url>/audit/getActiveUsers</url>

  <format default="json"/>

  <authentication>admin</authentication>

  <family>Audit</family>

</webscript>

2-      Create a freemarker template “getActiveUsers.get.json.ftl” which is used to generate the view

<#escape x as jsonUtils.encodeJSONString(x)> ${response} </#escape>

3-      Create a Java webscript class “GetActiveUsersWebscript.java”

package com.github.abhinavmishra14.audit.webscript;

import java.util.Map;

import java.util.Set;

import java.util.concurrent.ConcurrentHashMap;

import org.alfresco.error.AlfrescoRuntimeException;

import org.alfresco.repo.security.authentication.TicketComponent;

import org.json.JSONException;

import org.json.JSONObject;

import org.slf4j.Logger;

import org.slf4j.LoggerFactory;

import org.springframework.extensions.webscripts.Cache;

import org.springframework.extensions.webscripts.DeclarativeWebScript;

import org.springframework.extensions.webscripts.Status;

import org.springframework.extensions.webscripts.WebScriptException;

import org.springframework.extensions.webscripts.WebScriptRequest;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.core.JsonProcessingException;

import com.fasterxml.jackson.databind.ObjectMapper;

/**

* The Class GetActiveUsersWebscript.

*/

public class GetActiveUsersWebscript extends DeclarativeWebScript {

/** The Constant LOGGER. */

private static final Logger LOGGER = LoggerFactory.getLogger(GetActiveUsersWebscript.class);

/** The Constant ACTIVE_USERS. */

private static final String ACTIVE_USERS = "activeUsers";

/** The Constant ACTIVE_USERS_COUNT. */

private static final String ACTIVE_USERS_COUNT = "activeUsersCount";

/** The Constant ACTIVE_TICKETS_COUNT. */

private static final String ACTIVE_TICKETS_COUNT = "activeTicketsCount";

/** The Constant COMMENT_DATA. */

private static final String COMMENT_DATA = "_comment";

/** The Constant COMMENT. */

private static final String COMMENT = "getActiveUsers.comment";

/** The Constant RESPONSE. */

private static final String RESPONSE = "response";

/** The ticket component. */

private final TicketComponent ticketComponent;

/**

* The Constructor.

*

* @param ticketComponent the ticket component

*/

public GetActiveUsersWebscript(final TicketComponent ticketComponent) {

  super();

  this.ticketComponent = ticketComponent;

}

@Override

public Map<String, Object> executeImpl(final WebScriptRequest req,

                final Status status, final Cache cache) {

final Map<String, Object> model = new ConcurrentHashMap<String, Object>(3);

  try {

                //get nonExpiredOnly users with tickets

                final Set<String> activeUsers = ticketComponent.getUsersWithTickets(true);

                final ObjectMapper objMapper = new ObjectMapper();

                objMapper.enable(DeserializationFeature.ACCEPT_SINGLE_VALUE_AS_ARRAY);

                if (activeUsers != null && !activeUsers.isEmpty()) {

                  final JSONObject activeUsersJson = new JSONObject();

                //This may be lower than the ticket count, since a user can have more than one

              // ticket/session

                 activeUsersJson.put(ACTIVE_USERS, objMapper.writeValueAsString(activeUsers));

                activeUsersJson.put(ACTIVE_USERS_COUNT, activeUsers.size());

                //This may be higher than the user count, since a user can have more than one   

               // ticket/session

                //get nonExpiredOnly ticket count

                activeUsersJson.put(ACTIVE_TICKETS_COUNT, ticketComponent.countTickets(true));

                activeUsersJson.put(COMMENT_DATA, "Active user count may be lower than the ticket count, since a user can have more than one ticket/session. Ticket count may be higher than the active user count, since a user can have more than one ticket/session.");

                model.put(RESPONSE, activeUsersJson);

           }

    } catch (JsonProcessingException | JSONException excp) {

                LOGGER.error("Exception occurred while preparing json for active users ", excp);

                throw new WebScriptException(

                  Status.STATUS_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR, excp.getMessage(), excp);

    } catch (AlfrescoRuntimeException alfErr) {

                LOGGER.error("Unexpected error occurred while getting active users ", alfErr);

                throw new WebScriptException(

                  Status.STATUS_INTERNAL_SERVER_ERROR,     alfErr.getMessage(), alfErr);

    }

    return model;

   }

}

4-      Add the bean definition for the java webscript in spring context file.

<bean id="webscript.com.github.abhinavmishra14.audit.getActiveUsers.get"

class=" com.github.abhinavmishra14.audit.webscript.GetActiveUsersWebscript" parent="webscript">

    <constructor-arg ref="ticketComponent"/>

 </bean>

5-      Build and start the alfresco instance.

6-      Access the service using URL: http://127.0.0.1:8080/alfresco/service/audit/getActiveUsers (You will be prompted for credentials, note that the user should be admin who is accessing this service)

7-      It will return following type of response:

{

 activeTicketsCount: 3,

 activeUsers: "["admin","test","test2@gmail.com "]",

 activeUsersCount: 3,

 _comment: "Active user count may be lower than the ticket count, since a user can have more than one ticket/session. Ticket count may be higher than the active user count, since a user can have more than one ticket/session."

}