Hi,

I recently committed several changes that ease life with OpenXPKI a bit.

Previous to r1567 an incorrect OpenXPKI configuration could lead to a nasty 
situation: if the configuration contained certain logical errors it was first 
parsed and persisted to the database. Then the system might detect that there 
is a problem and bail out during server start. Now, fixing the problem in XML 
did not really resolve the problem, because the errorneous configuration was 
already in the database and the system tried to reinstantiate it on every 
server start, resulting in a failure again.
In such a situation the only remedy was to actually delete the incorrect 
configuration from the database (which involved digging through the log files 
in order to find out the culprit - and don't make a mistake and delete the 
wrong config...).

Commit 1567 eases things in a way that incorrect configurations are simply 
ignored during server startup. They get logged in the OpenXPKI logfile to allow 
the administrator to clean up.


Commit 1568 addresses a related problem: the system tries to reinstantiate the 
configuration that was active when a workflow was created. If a system 
administrator decides to delete a configuration from the database (for whatever 
reason) this results in Zombie workflows which cannot even be displayed, nor 
executed. This commit makes the system ignore this problem and fall back to the 
current configuration. (If we had a timestamp in the config table, it would 
possibly make more sense to pick the configuration whose "activation timestamp" 
is next after creation time of the WF. We don't have that, so we use the 
current config.)

This admittedly introduces debatable side effects: a workflow could be in a 
state which is no longer contained in the current WF definition, or the WF 
graph may have changed in a way that would result in unexpected behavior of a 
WF instance. 
However, I decided that this is preferable to having a WF that cannot even be 
viewed. Moreover, having long running Workflows in the database (e. g. 
Passwordsafe WF) make it impossible to clean up the configuration backlog.

Interestingly, falling back to a recent configuration not only bears the 
problem of possibly leaving a WF stranded, but it also helps resolving a 
problem with outdated configuration, such as system paths (path to 
executables), external resources (such as LDAP directory or credentials).

We figured there are configuration portions one wants to be versioned, and 
others which should better be taken from the latest configuration. This issues 
will be addressed soon in a rather radical approach. Scott is working on this 
at the moment.


Finally, some of my earler commits (r1560 - r1565) introduce better tracking of 
"custom attributes" as defined in the certificate profile. The commits add 
metadata entered by the user to the CERTIFICATE_ATTRIBUTES table. In addition 
it is now possible to search not only for subject and serial number, but for 
any combination of certificate attributes (primarily subject alternative names, 
but also these additional information). A combined search can now be entered 
via the "Search Certificate" menu.


Cheers

Martin


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