Publiqate

Publiqate is an extendable notification handler for Qlik Sense (QSEoW).

QSEoW have Notification API which can call specific URL when specified events are raised (like tasks failures, node/services down, any entity creation/deletion/update etc).

Publiqate abstracts the notifications registration and maintenance. It allows you to describe the notifications in yaml file and it will take care of the rest.

Plugins

Built-in

3 built-in plugins are available out of the box:

• http - send the notification data to a specified url (POST request)
• file - write the notification data into a file (json. Each notification on a new line)
• echo - just logs the notification data into the Publiqate logs

Custom plugins

Publiqate can load custom build plugins. The plugins should export a single JS function (implementation) and Publiqate will pass the data to it. The plugins can utilize whatever packages are needed and to be build to a ESM package (ideally into a single file).

The very basic plugin:

export function implementation(callback, notification, logger) {
  // do something with the notification data
}

3 arguments will be passed to the implementation function:

• callback - the part of the config callback that is associated with that notification
• notification - the actual notification data
• logger - logger instance. Write anything to the log file with it (instance of Winston logger)

notification argument have the following structure:

{
  config: {}, // full notification config (from the config file)
  environment: {}, // Qlik env details (from the config file)
  data: [], // the notification data
  entities: [] // full Qlik entities data that raised the notification
}

notification.data have the same structure for all notifications:

"data": [
    {
        "changeType": 2,
        "objectType": "ExecutionResult",
        "objectID": "a5852393-6d0c-4842-9ddf-3c49b1bd3446",
        "changedProperties": [
            "modifiedDate",
            "stopTime",
            "duration"
        ],
        "engineID": "",
        "engineType": "",
        "originatorNodeID": "6b3a6fa8-6f3d-4211-9823-75976a88623d",
        "originatorHostName": "some-host-name.com",
        "originatorContextID": null,
        "createdDate": "2024-11-19T07:37:20.031Z",
        "modifiedDate": "2024-11-19T07:37:20.156Z",
        "schemaPath": "ExternalChangeInfo"
    }
]

notification.entities property structure depends on what entity has triggered the notification. List of all entities and their structure can be seen on Qlik's Repository API reference page

Config

Config is separated in 4 sections:

General

Config the general behavior of Publiqate

general:
  port: # on which port Publiqate will receive the notifications
  uri: "192.168.137.1"
  certs: # path to pem certificates if we need the qlik -> Publiqate comms to be https. Only valid certificates! If the certificate is not valid for some reason (self-signed for example) Qlik is not sending the notification!
  logLevel: # log levels: debug, info, error, warning, crit. Default is info
  vars: # check the "Config variables" section
  admin:
    port: # onl which port the admin UI to be started
    cookie: # name and value of a cookie to be accepted by the admin api endpoints
      name: # cookie name
      value: # cookie value
    certs: # path to pem certificates for the admin UI

Qlik

Multiple Qlik instances can be defined. When Publiqate starts it will connect to all of them and will create the required notifications.

qlik:
  - name: # name of the qlik environment'
    certs: # path to qlik's certificates
    host: # machine name of the central node
    userName: # which user to use when communicating with Qlik. Default sa_scheduler
    userDir: # above user's directory. Default INTERNAL

Plugins (optional)

Define list with plugins to be loaded.

plugins:
  - c:\path\to\plugin\index.js
  - c:\path\to\another\plugin\index.js

Notifications

The "main" part where the actual notifications are defined.

notifications:
  - type: ExecutionResult
    environment: # name of the Qlik environment
    name: # name of the notification
    id: # unique ID of the notification
    filter:
    condition:
    changeType:
    propertyName:
    options:
      disableCors: # if true the notification endpoint can be accessed from everywhere. Default is false
      whitelist: # list of hosts that can access the notification endpoint. Default is the Qlik central node machine name
        - my-link.com
        - 192.168.0.1
      enabled: # true or false. If false then when Qlik sends the notification nothing will be triggered here
      getEntityDetails: # if true Publiqate will retrieve full entity details from Qlik
    callbacks: # what to do when notification is received. Multiple callbacks can be triggered for single notification.
      - type: http # the name of the plugin
        details: # details associated with the plugin
          method: post
          url: http://localhost:3000
      - type: file # another plugin
        details:
          path: c:\some\file.json

Config variables

It is possible to use variables file to store any sensitive values (passwords, api keys, secrets etc). The variables files location is specified in the general.vars property.

user_name=SomeUser
user_password=my-secret-password

general:
...
vars: c:\path\to\variables.txt
...
callbacks:
  - type: smtp
    details:
      user: ${user_name}
      password: ${user_password}

In the config file variables are defined with ${...}. From the above example the content of ${user_name} will be replaced with the respective value from the variables.txt file.

Variables can be used for any property of the config file.

Installation

In the future the package will be published into npm but for now the way to install it is to clone the repo and run npm install and then npm run build from the folder where the clone is.

Also in the near future there will be a section here that describes how to install the package as a Windows service.