Configuration of the Sheetster Mindtouch Addon

Owned by Robert Avery
Oct 24, 2012
2 min read

The DocsFree Sheetster Mindtouch Add-On is a powerful solution for wiki-based social spreadsheet editing and management.

For typical installations, these steps are unnecessary as the Sheetster installer will guide you and automatically make the correct choices.  However if you need to further troubleshoot or customize a Sheetster Mindtouch installation, this document will step you through the process of downloading the Add On and configuring your Mindtouch environment to enable editing of spreadsheet docs inline with the Mindtouch user interface.

Configuration Steps:

  1. Check that your Mindtouch version meets minimum system requirements 

    Currently the Sheetster Add-On has been tested in version 10

  2. Download Sheetster Add-On

    The DocsFree Sheetster Mindtouch  Add-On is available for download here:

    http://extentech.com/products/download/SheetsterMT/install.htm

    Please run the installer and follow the on-screen instructions for setting your Sheetster admin password and other basic configuration. Once installed, you should be able to run and test the Sheetster Server product as a standalone web spreadsheet by navigating your browser to:

    http://127.0.0.1:8000/ 

  3. Configure the Mindtouch to use Sheetster for Editing Spreadsheet Document

    The DocsFree Sheetster Add-On installation creates modifications and additions to a few Mindtouch configuration files.

    webroot/deki/plugins/files_table/files_table.php 

    This file modifies the file listing attributes.

    NOTE: this file needs to be manually modified if you are running Sheetster on an ip/port other than 127.0.0.1:8000.
    Change the following line, line 34, to fit your environment

    const SHEETSTER_URL = 'http://127.0.01:8000';

    webroot/deki/plugins/files_table/files_table.js

    This file subverts some of the standardized behavior in MindTouch that causes problems with lightbox sizing

    webroot/deki/wiki/skins/common/jquery/thickbox/thickbox.js

    This is a customized thickbox script that is built into Mindtouch.

    For now we have modified the JavaScript  to work for us by passing GET strings in a certain order.

    /resources/luminet.script

    The luminet.script file contains Sheetster configuration items.  The following Pluggable Storage settings configure Sheetster to work with MindTouch as a back end repository:

    INSERT INTO LUMINET_CONFIG VALUES('sys',0,'session_mode','stateless',285,'If set to stateless this field will allow all permissions and data to be handled by the associated Auth objects.  Do not add this value unless you are doing custom integration work','')

    INSERT INTO LUMINET_CONFIG VALUES('connect',0,'storage_provider','mindtouch',333,'Set to the friendly name of the CMIS backend provider.','')

    INSERT INTO LUMINET_CONFIG VALUES('connect',0,'storage_repository','http://192.168.2.183/@api/deki/files/',331,'The URL for the CMIS server ie: MindTouch','') 
  4. (OPTIONAL) The Mindtouch Sheetster Add On Extension File

    /sheetster/uimodules/connect/sheetsterLB.xml

    The Sheetster extension allows for some cool things for power users and dekiscript programmers. For example, the following dekiscript will iterate all of the files attached to an existing page, list them out as links in the content area of the page that will then open up inside a lightbox (without the sizing errors as well this time).

    If you are not familiar with deki extensions, we need to load the extension above in the deki before the following dekiscript will work:
    {{ foreach(var file in map.values( page.files ) )
    {
    var auth = user.Authtoken;
    var uid = user.Id;
    var fileNum =string.SubStr(file.api, (string.LastIndexOf(file.api, "/"))+1);
    var fileNm = file.Name;
    sheetsterLB.sheetsterThickBox{fileId: filenum, userId: uid, fileName: fileNm, authToken:auth, ipAddress: "192.168.2.195:8000"};
    }
    }}