This article targets: TIBCO Spotfire 2.0, TIBCO Spotfire Analytics Server 10.1 or later
Introduction
In one of my previous posts, I mentioned how to enable an RSS feed in the Spotfire login dialog. Besides that setting, there are a number of other ways in which you can fine-tune the login dialog of the TIBCO Spotfire client. These settings are all changed in the Analytics Server manifest file which you can find at [server_installation_directory]\server\webapps\spotfire\WEB-INF\manifest.xml. Note that changes to the settings are made on a per server basis which means that each Analytics Server decides how the clients that connect to it will behave.
Client Login Dialog Behaviors
The Analytics Server administrator can set the following values to control the behavior of the clients’ login dialog.
Display Mode (show-login-dialog):
This setting controls if and when the login dialog is shown. The three supported values are:
| standard | When set, the login dialog is shown when user interaction is necessary to log into the server (i.e. the user needs to provide his/her username and password).
If the user has chosen the application to remember his/her credentials, those will be used to automatically log into the server without the dialog being displayed.
The login dialog is also not shown when the server supports Windows Integrated Authentication or digital certificate login, in which case the user’s Windows account or an installed certificate is used to log in.
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| never | When set, the login dialog is never shown. It is highly recommended to use this value if the server supports Windows Integrated Authentication (NTLM or Kerberos). This will prevent users from logging in with credentials other than those derived from the Windows account that they are logged in with.
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| always | When set, the login dialog is always shown, even if the application can automatically log in the user. It is recommended to use this value if an RSS feed is enabled. Doing so ensures that users are able to see the contents of the feed, even though they have chosen to save their username and password for easier login. |
Remember Me (allow-save-information):
For security reasons, you may want to disable users to have the application store their usernames and passwords. By using false as the value of this setting, you disable the “Save my login information” checkbox in the client login dialog.
Work Offline (always-online):
If you wish your users to always connect to a server when using TIBCO Spotfire, you can set the value of this setting to true. In doing so you disable the “Work Offline” button in the client login dialog.
Offline Limit (offline-days-permitted):
In some cases you may want to enforce your users to check in with the server, not every time but once in a while. This may be useful to make sure that they have the latest patches and updates. To solve this problem, you set the offline limit to the number of days that you wish clients to work disconnected from the server. If you want to disable this feature, you set the setting to infinite.
Changing the Settings
The snippet below shows the XML node that contains the settings discussed in this article. Make the changes you need using your favorite XML editor, save the file, and restart the server for the changes to be applied.
<manifest>
…
<client-login>
<show-login-dialog>standard</show-login-dialog>
<always-online>false</always-online>
<allow-save-information>true</allow-save-information>
<offline-days-permitted>infinite</offline-days-permitted>
…
</client-login>
…
</manifest>