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Concerns:Vision Management Site

Edition:Futurama Website/Futurama Export/Futurama Webservice

Module:Futurama Vision

User:Application owner

Prerequisites

- installation of the Futurama Vision Management Site

Introduction

This document describes the usage of the Futurama Vision File manager to view and/or manipulate the file system on remote systems.

 

Description

The Futurama Vision Filemanager enables you to manage the file system where your Futurama Applications are installed without the need to log on to the server where the Futurama Applications are installed.

User interface

The File Manager consists of a couple of areas:

  • A Toolbar (top) consisting of operations that are enabled/disabled for the current state.
  • A Navigator (left) allowing navigation through the hierarchical structure of folders.
  • A Folder view (middle/right), that lists the contents of the currently opened folder.
  • A Status bar (bottom) showing some information about the currently opened folder, and any possible selected items.
  • A context menu when the right mouse button is used on a target. This allows similar operations to be executed as the toolbar.

Usage

The File manager page shows a similar user interface to most regular operating systems, and allows similar operations. The main screen shows the hierarchical directory structure on the left side, and the contents of the current working directory in the middle.

At this moment, Futurama Visions Filemanager support the following operations:

Viewing logfiles (Futurama 17.11+)

When the selected file is potentially a Futurama Log-file, it is possible to open this file in the Futurama logfile viewer. When this button or menu-item is pressed, a new window will open showing the log file entries.

This function is available for files with the following extensions: .TXT, .LOG and .XML.

Downloading files

By selecting a file (or multiple files) and pressing the download button on the toolbar you can download a file to your local system.
Downloading multiple files simultaneous does not work on Microsoft Internet Explorer.

Uploading files

By pressing the ‘upload file’ button, you can choose a file (or multiple files) on your local system to upload to the current opened directory in the file manager.

Deleting files

The delete function can be accessed by selecting the files or directories to be deleted, and pressing the right button, and selecting the “delete” function in the context menu. A confirmation popup will be shown to ask whether you really want to delete the selected files and/or directories.

Download files as zip

After selecting a number of files and/or directories, you can press the “download zip” button, which will compress the selection in a single zip file and offer it as a download for your local system. If any directories are selected, the zip-files internal structure will mimic the structure on the original file system, and files and directories within the selected directories will also be included.

Uploading zip files

In conjunction to the zip-download function, it is also possible to upload a zip-file to be extracted in the current directory. A button exists within the toolbar and context menu that will open a popup screen, which will allow you to select a zip-file to upload.

When this zip-file is sent to the server, it will extract the files and directories and place them in the target location. If a file or directory with the same name is already present at this location, the new file/directory will be renamed to prevent overwriting the existing file/directory. So if you want to release a new version of your application, you first have to delete the current application (be sure to have a backup of this old application) and then upload the new version.

When a zip file is uploaded to a location on the C-drive, it will change the permissions of the uploaded file on the target location to match with the current permissions. To make sure it is able to do this, the Vision Management Site should have "Full Control" on the location where the zip file is uploaded.

Renaming files/directories (Futurama 17.08+)

Renaming a file or a directory is possible by opening the context menu with the right mouse button, and selecting the rename-option.

Copying a file or directory (Futurama 17.08+)

A file or directory can be copied by first opening the folder where the target items are present, and selecting them. From this point they can be dragged with the left mouse button to any desired directory. It is also possible to use the ubiquitous copy/paste buttons that are present in the context menu and the toolbar.

Create a directory (Futurama 17.08+)

By pressing the right mouse button on the empty space within a folder, the context menu will show the option to create a new folder.

Web Configuration files

The File manager will mostly be used to manage Futurama Web applications and their data. In order to protect sensitive configuration data and settings within these applications, all interactions with ‘web.config’ files has been disabled. This means that these files cannot be downloaded, uploaded, deleted, overwritten or accessed in any way. You will have to ask a system administrator if an operation must be performed on a web.config file.

 

Security

To make sure there is no unauthorized access to any server files, there are two layers of security present.

The first layer ensures that only authenticated Vision users can access the File manager page (using Forms or Windows authentication). This page can be secured just like any other Futurama Vision page through the security menu. To read more about setting Vision security, please read this page.

The second layer of security is arranged by the hosting configuration of Futurama Vision. Even though the Vision user will be logged in using Windows- or Forms-authentication, the file access will be executed using the identity of the process that is running the Vision Application. As Vision is being hosted on Microsoft IIS, this identity is usually configured as “ApplicationPoolIdentity”. Your system administrator is advised to grant the websites process user account the very minimal rights needed for the operation. In addition to these rights, the process should only be allowed the needed file system rights for altering files and/or directories in the file manager target location.

Current restrictions

At the current time, it’s advised not to allow any folders at the top level that are named identical to the root folder. So when a rootfolder has been defined as “C:\myRootFolder”, then the existance of a subfolder “C:\myRootFolder\myRootFolder” should be avoided.

Troubleshooting

Error 'Maximum request length exceeded' occurs while importing

This error occurs because of the default security settings of Microsoft ASP.NET that limit the amount of data that can be sent to a page. The security settings make it so that DDoS attacks (sending huge amounts of data in order to overload the server) are not possible on the webserver. To upload large files, the settings of the web.config file should be adjusted.

Within the XML-node configuration>, the following code should be placed:

<location path="Secure/Filesystem/Filemanager/Main">
	<system.web>
		<httpRuntime executionTimeout="3600" maxRequestLength="1024000">
		</httpRuntime>
	</system.web>
	<system.webServer>
		<security>
			<requestFiltering>
				<!--For IIS 7-->
				<requestLimits maxAllowedContentLength="1024000000">
				</requestLimits>
			</requestFiltering>
		</security>
	</system.webServer>
</location>

By entering this code into the "" node it allows the maximum size of the file to be 1024000KB, which is 1 Gigabytes. The code also adjusts the time-out period of this operation to 3600 seconds, which is 1 hour. Making this adjustment should allow importing Zip-files of size till 1 Gigabytes, and the error should not occur anymore.

Related Topics

- Configuration - File manager: Topic related to the configuration of the Vision File manager.

- Futurama Vision Management Site – Security: Learn how to secure pages within Futurama Vision

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Updated: 2017-12-05