GUS User's Guide

Plugins are small programs that work with the GUS application to load data. See the Developer's Guide for more information about the Plugin API and writing plugins. GUS comes with two types of plugins: Supported and Community. Supported plugins have been tested in both Oracle and Postgres and have been confirmed to work properly, are portable across any site with a standard GUS installation, and widely useful, and meet the plugin standard outlined in the Developer's Guide. Community plugins are provided as part of GUS as well, but they fail to meet at least one of these criteria and they should be reviewed prior to use.

GUS requires that all plugins be registered prior to use. This allows for close auditing of the environment in which the plugin operated and ensures that changes within a plugin do not go unnoticed. When you attempt to use a plugin that has not been registered, ga will respond with an error:

USER ERROR: GUS::Supported::Plugin::InsertControl has never been registered.
Please use 'ga +create GUS::Supported::Plugin::InsertControl --commit'

You must then use the command provided to register the plugin. In this case:

$ ga +create GUS::Supported::Plugin::InsertControl --commit

If a plugin changes since being registered, you may receive a similar error, requesting that you use the ga +update ... command.

Plugins are run using the ga command with the full name of the plugin, as well as any command line arguments:

$ ga GUS::Supported::Plugin::PluginName --argumentName  argumentValue 

When you are ready to save the changes to the database, you must add the --commit flag to the ga command:

$ ga GUS::Supported::Plugin::PluginName --argumentName  argumentValue --commit

For more information on how to create new plugins or modify existing plugins, please see the GUS Developer's Guide.

GUS provides basic functionality for tracking changes and controlling access by users, groups, and projects. To use this functionality, you must first create User, Group, and Project entries in the database. If you've just completed installing GUS, these will be entered using the dba user and group, and the Database administration project (these three values are the default in every GUS installation). These tables are populated with either the LoadRow or LoadGusXml generic plugins. Examples are below.

ga GUS::Supported::Plugin::LoadRow --tablename Core::UserInfo --attrlist \
        "login,password,first_name,last_name,e_mail" \ 
        --valuelist jsmith^^^p@ss^^^Jane^^^Smith^^^jsmith@example.org --commit

ga GUS::Supported::Plugin::LoadRow --tablename Core::GroupInfo \
        --attrlist name --valuelist samplegroup --commit

<Core::ProjectInfo>
     <name>Sample project</name>
     <description>A sample project</description>
</Core::ProjectInfo>
//

ga GUS::Supported::Plugin::LoadGusXml --filename sampleproject.xml --commit

Once these tables have been populated, you must either update your $GUS_CONFIG_FILE and gus.config file (in the $PROJECT_HOME/install/ directory), or use the values from the command line when running plugins with the --user, --group, and --project flags.

GUS supports tracking third party databases and third party data releases through the SRes.ExternalDatabase, and SRes.ExternalDatabaseRelease tables. These tables may be populated using the InsertExternalDatabase and InsertExternalDatabaseRls plugins.

Metadata for tables is held in Core.TableInfo. Metadata for the Schemata are held in Core.DatabaseInfo. See the Developer's Guide for more information about extending GUS and adding to these tables.