Grooper Infrastructure

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Revision as of 10:04, 6 January 2020 by Configadmin (talk | contribs)

What is Grooper? Grooper is a repository of information made up by a SQL Server Database and a Windows file share. This information is displayed to the user via an application(s) that displays a 1 to 1 relationship of what exists in that database and fileshare. Gaining an understanding of how to properly create using Grooper begins by first understanding the structure of its architecture, and why it is built the way it is. This sets a foundational groundwork for knowing how to think and interact with the application.

The Three Layers of Grooper

Grooper consists of three main components that constantly interact with one another:

  1. Database
  2. Filestore
  3. Application

The Database

This is the core component of Grooper as all aspects of the functionality and configuration of a Grooper repository are stored here as metadata in cells of tables. There are 13 tables that make up the Grooper database:

  1. AccessControlEntry
  2. CustomStats
  3. FileStoreEntry
  4. License
  5. LicenseCheckout
  6. Lock
  7. Log
  8. NodeReference
  9. ProcessingTask
  10. ServiceInstance
  11. SessionStats

The File Store

The File Store in Grooper is a file share in a Windows environment. It houses the files associated with objects in Grooper that have information that would otherwise be inefficient to store in (a cell in) a database table.

The Application

This is the most visible aspect of Grooper as it is the software you interact with that displays the currently active repository. It consists of several pieces:

  1. Grooper Design Studio
  2. Config
  3. Grooper Attended Client
  4. Unattended Client

In discussing the overall picture of infrastructure, let’s focus on Grooper Design Studio for a moment, as it is the piece you will use most directly as you are developing processes. Every object in the Grooper Node Tree is an object, or row, in a specific table, the dbo.TreeNode table. The GUI of Grooper is essentially wrapping information from the Grooper database (again, this is a 1 to 1 relationship) into a series of grids and windows to allow you to directly interact with that database, and its related Windows fileshare, without writing SQL queries. It is also displaying and updating files that exist in the Grooper filestore that are associated with the objects you are interacting with. An example of this would be the extracted index data of a document, or the image displayed for a page.