Creating Registry-bound Deployables

Decoupling the configuration of a deployable from the Cortex database allows you to easily inject deployables from outside of Cortex. Registry-bound deployables are types of deployables which are not read from the Cortex database directly.

General

The difference between regular deployables and registry-bound deployables is that the latter are not read from the Cortex database but either from:

• the conf/configuration.json file
• an environment variable

Decoupling the configuration of a deployable from the Cortex database allows you to easily inject deployables from outside of Cortex. Imagine you have a Hibernate access connected to a database. If you wanted to test that access on a staging server before deploying it to a production instance, you'd need to create two separate connections:

• one with the staging server connection data
• one with the production server connection data

Using a registry-bound deployable allows you to create a placeholder value where normally your connection would be and use either the configuration.json or an environment variable to provide the value for the connection object. A property bindId is used to determine where to inject your deployable. You must specify the bindId where you want your registry-bound deployable to be injected as well as in your deployable definition, so the system knows which deployable you want to inject.

For more information about the configuration.json file and environment variables in the context of this file, see Configuring tribefire with configuration.json.

As of now, registry-bound deployables work for the following elements:

• Connection

Creating a Registry-bound Connection

1. In Control Center, create a new connection. When asked about the type, select RegistryBoundConnectionPool.

2. Provide the necessary properties name and externalId, for example: myConnection and REPO_ACCESS_CONNECTION.

3. Provide a bindId, for example: REPO_ACCESS_CONNECTION.

   Note the bindId and the externalId are the same. You will use them in your registry-bound deployable JSON definition.

4. In your file explorer, navigate to tribefire/conf/configuration.json (if the file doesn't exist, create it) and create your deployable JSON definition in there, for example:

   [  
      {  
         "_type":"com.braintribe.cartridge.common.processing.configuration.url.model.RegistryEntry",
         "bindId":"REPO_ACCESS_CONNECTION",
         "denotation":{  
            "_type":"com.braintribe.model.deployment.database.pool.HikariCpConnectionPool",
            "externalId":"REPO_ACCESS_CONNECTION",
            "name":"RepoAccessRegistryBoundConnection",
            "minPoolSize":1,
            "maxPoolSize":4,
            "connectionDescriptor":{  
               "_type":"com.braintribe.model.deployment.database.connector.GenericDatabaseConnectionDescriptor",
               "user":"cortex",
               "password":"cortex",
               "url":"URL_TO_YOUR_DATABASE",
               "driver":"YOUR_DATABASE_DRIVER"
            }
         }
      }
   ]
   
   

   Every registry-bound deployable must be of the type com.braintribe.cartridge.common.processing.configuration.url.model.RegistryEntry.

5. Restart the server. Your deployable is injected in place of the placeholder connection you specified with the bindId of REPO_ACCESS_CONNECTION.

6. Make sure it works by deploying and testing the connection using the action on the Action Bar.