[rt-devel] SOAP , RT & MON

[Michael]

Greetings.

Some weeks back there was some discussion on rt-devel regarding remote-control
of RT via SOAP or some other mechanism .. 

I'm writing to state that I was able to establish a working RPC link between 
our monitoring system (MON) and RT 2.X (from CVS) using SOAP::Lite.

If anyone else is interested , a brief overview follows.  

If there is sufficient interest, I can provide the actual MON/RT files
at some later date..  There are some security concerns that should
probably be addressed (or at least acknowledged) before anyone
goes installing this type of setup in production.


* What i did 

- Installed SOAP::Lite PERL Module

- Wrote a custom PERL module (RT/RPC/SimpleRT.pm) , which 
  exports a simplified ticket creation routine (create_ticket)
  to the remote application.  

  In this way the complexity of the RT API is hidden behind
  a very simple interface.

-  The RT/RPC directory is then auto-dispatched by Apache::SOAP
   via httpd.conf .  This is a very clean approach as it requires 
   zero on-disk configuration for providing SOAP HTTP transport.

   This RPC directory can (and will be used by us) also be used
    to provide much more complex RT-RPC interactions at a later
    time.


- Apache config

   <RT_VIRTUAL_HOST>

	<Location /SOAP>
	SetHandler perl-script
	PerlHandler Apache::SOAP

	## Only export RPC stuff!
	PerlSetVar dispatch_to "<RT_INSTALL_ROOT>/lib/RT/RPC"
	PerlSetVar options "compress_threshold => 10000"
	</Location>

   </RT_VIRTUAL_HOST>


- Finally, i wrote a MON alert in PERL to create tickets in
  our tracking database for network events.  The RT specific
  code for that looks something like this: 

	## Last but not least..
	use SOAP::Lite +autodispatch =>
	  uri => 'urn:/SimpleRT',
	  proxy => 'http://<OUR_RT_SERVER>/SOAP';

	my $s = SimpleRT->new();

	## [ snip ]

	my ($id,$resp) = $s->create_ticket($queue,$subject,$own,$ops,$msg);
	
	## thats all


- Well, thats my overview.  I'd been putting off sending this 
  email for a while now , so i'll hit send right now. 


best,


_Michael.


 [  Note that i had to rebuild my mod_perl apache for Apache::SOAP to
     work properly (ie: not segfault!).  This was due to some type of 
     conflict with the expat library (or something like that) .  

     The configure directive i used follows

	./configure \
	"--with-layout=Apache" \
	"--prefix=/usr/local/apache_modperl" \
	"--activate-module=src/modules/perl/libperl.a" \
	"--disable-rule=EXPAT" 



--
Michael A. Jastremski  				Openphoto.net
Megaglobal Corporation				Megaglobal.net
Philadelphia, PA, USA				Westphila.net