BUSINESS PROBLEMS

Connectors in Attivio's Active Intelligence Engine (AIE, now Attivio Platform) are out of the box components that run as complex Java based processes that work on data. Using the Staged Event Driven Architecture these components cleanup, lemmatize, massage etc. the structured and unstructured data and finally get it ready for ingestion into AIE engine which is an inverted Lucene index. These connectors were initially configurable and customizable through all their properties, levers and switches using XML files. As non-technical personas started using the product, there was a demand to provide a UI that abstracts the XML editing. Hence, customers wanted a UI based mechanism for working with Connectors and fine tuning their properties.

SOLUTION

A dynamic UI module was designed and developed that would allow user to configure the Spring Beans of the Connectors that have annotations. These beans are used to ingest data (amongst other data operations) into the search engine.

The first step was to design a framework to work with the beans such that using property introspection, all its configuration options just render in a UI form. Then various operations could be done on the bean, like start, stop, cancel etc. The following was the UML model for the approach:

Another view of how the UI would talk to the backend.

The final result was the UI where the user can interact with the Connector beans without editing XMLs. The UI was designed and developed as a GWT module and it would run as part of AIE admin console.

MY ROLE

I co-designed and co-developed this module.