Features-Autopopulate Extension¶

The Features Autopopulate plug-in listens to transactions (so far only issued by WFS), and autopopulates the feature type attributes according to the values retrieved from the properties file.

The plugin uses a custom TransactionCallback that alters the insert/update WFS-T operations, forcing in specific values into them, based on configuration files.

To support configuration for multiple layers, the easiest thing is to place a configuration, file in the directories of the layers themselves, pretty much like the featureinfo templates.

Assume that we want to allow GeoServer updating automatically two attributes of the topp:states feature type every time we are going to perform an insert or update transaction.

In particular what we want to do is:

• Update/insert into the EDITOR the current GeoServer user.

• Update/insert into the LAST_UPDATE the current timestamp

We can leverage on two GeoServer CQL Expressions that allow us to get thos values at runtime

EDITOR=env('GSUSER')
LAST_UPDATE=now()

The function env('GSUSER') reads the system environment for a variable named GSUSER, resolves the value and returns back the current logged-in username.

This one is a special variable automatically created by GeoServer at login time and injected into the local environment (see #EnviromentInjectionCallback for more details)

The function now() gets the current timestamp and returns back the date-time.

What we need to do then is to create a file named transactionCustomizer.properties inside the folder $GEOSERVER_DATADIR/workspaces/topp/states with the current key-value pairs

EDITOR=env('GSUSER')
LAST_UPDATE=now()

NOTE: The extension will look for the existing properties into the feature type. If no field matches the ones specified into the transactionCustomizer.properties, the value will be ignored. The matches are case-sensitive.