Using Profile File Retrieval

Profile is concerned with three directories within the data directory:

  • msgs

  • roles

  • users

How Profile determines which USER, ROLE, and MESSAGES file from within these directories is explained in each of the sections below.

PORTAL_USER File

Profile first checks the users directory for a file that corresponds to the RM ID of the user (see the "id" attribute value in the ATTRIBUTES section of the Profile output to see what the user’s RM ID is).

Profile expects the file to be named: <RM ID>.xml. For instance, if the RM ID of the user was "user123", Profile would look for a file named user123.xml.

If Profile fails to find that file, it will retrieve the default user file and it will give a warning message in the STATUS section indicating it could not find a file specific to the user.

The default user file is normally default.xml. However, clients can override this default file by defining a property in theiosconfig.xml . This property is named PROFILE_DEFAULT_USER_FILE.

Customers may choose to do this to prevent client-specific changes to the default user file from being overwritten when Lawson Portal is patched. For Profile to pick up any change to the PROFILE_DEFAULT_USER_FILE attribute, the servlet container must be bounced.

Note: If a client defines their own default user file, Profile expects this new default file to be located in the users directory.

Caching

To improve performance, the first time Profile reads the default user file, it caches it as well as the bookmark identifiers contained in that file. Prior to reading the default file, Profile checks the timestamp and updates the cached default file and bookmark identifiers as necessary. User specific files (e.g., user123.xml) are not cached because there may be such a large number of these.