This module provides the base for creating an industrial data collection and synchronization application for iTop. Developers can rely on this module to perform all the heavy lifting related to the iTop data import and synchronization process in order to focus on the data collection.

• Simple API to make the creation of a new collector fast and easy.
• Automatic creation and update of Synchronization Data Sources in iTop, based on JSON definitions.
• Support small variations to the target Data Model via explicitely “Optional” attributes
• Basic validation of the CSV format compared to the expected fields in the synchro data source.
• Data upload and synchronization by chunks of max_chunk_size (configurable).
• Extensible mechanism for handling configuration parameters.
• Extensible list of placeholders in the JSON definition.
• Automatic management (via placeholders) of the contact to notify and the user to use for running the synchro.
• Validation of the minimum version of PHP and the needed extensions (as specified by the collector).
• Command line tool to produce the JSON definition from an existing Synchro Data Source in iTop.
• Capability to run independently: the configuration of the data sources, the data collection and the data synchronization.
• Configurable log level (for console output or syslog logging)
• Simple framework for quickly creating SQL based collectors

• Data upload to iTop is done only via the syncho_import web service (could use the command line version or direct SQLcommands. TBD later, maybe)
• Prior to the revision 3805 of iTop from SVN (from 2015-10-12!) the collector will NOT work properly if the account used to connect to iTop is not configured to use English as the language !!

• PHP Version 5.3.0 (support of namespaces may be required by some collectors)
• An access to the iTop web services (REST + synchro_import.php and synchro_exec.php)
• We recommand to install php_curl to use the collector base parameter itop_synchro_timeout otherwise the timeout is hardcoded to 200 secondes and can't be overwritten by the collector.

• Expand the content of the zip archive on a folder on the machine were the collector will run.
• Edit the content of the file conf/params.local.xml to suit your installation.

params.local.xml is the only file to edit to configure a collector.

At minimum the following parameters must be set in this file:

  <itop_url>https://localhost/</itop_url>
  <itop_login>admin</itop_login>
  <itop_password>admin</itop_password>

The following parameters can be redefined to alter the default behavior of the collector:

<curl_options>
    <CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST>0</CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYHOST>
    <CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER>1</CURLOPT_SSL_VERIFYPEER>
  </curl_options>

To launch the data collection and synchronization with iTop, run the following command (from the root directory where the application is installed):

php exec.php

The following (optional) command line options are available:

In many circumstances it may be useful to run several times the collector with a different set of parameters. For example to collect persons information from several LDAP servers (iTop Data Collector for LDAP) or Virtual Machines information from several vSphere servers (iTop Data Collector for vSphere).

Prior to version 1.1.4 of the framework, you had to completely duplicate the collector application and adjust the file conf/params.local.xml on each copy.

Since version 1.1.4 you can have just one single copy the of the collector application and specify a different configuration file (with the command line option --config_file) for each collection to run (i.e. one configuration file per LDAP or vSphere server).

However, to avoid any troubles during the collection of the data and the synchronization with iTop, the following parameters must be properly configured inside the configuration file:

• Use a different <prefix> inside each different configuration file. This ensures that a specific set of Synchronization Data Sources will be created for each configuration file.
• Use a different <data_path> variable for each configuration file. This will cause the collector to store all its collected data (including some temporary files) in a dedicated directory. This prevents one instance of the collector to overwrite the data of another one. You can use the syntax <data_path>%APPROOT%/data/collector1</data> to have a subfolder collector1 created inside the data folder.

The specifics about a collector resides inside the “collectors” folder. There must be at least one file main.php inside this folder. The purpose of main.php is to register all the Collector classes for your module and load the corresponding classes (either via require_once(…) or by registering an auto-loader).

A collector is a PHP class that provides the data for a given Synchronization Data Source. Collector classes are derived from the abstract Collector class. Each collector is associated with a Synchronization Data Source, defined in JSON format. The default implementation simply looks for a JSON file with the same name as the collector class and the extension “.json”, in the collectors folder.

If your collector needs a specific extension (or a minimum PHP version), you can indicate this dependency by calling the static method Orchestrator::AddRequirement($sMinRequiredVersion, $sExtension = 'PHP') in main.php:

For example:

Orchestrator::AddRequirement('5.4.0'); //This requires at least PHP 5.4
Orchestrator::AddRequirement('1.2.0', 'ldap'); //This requires at least the ldap extension version 1.2.0

The simpler way to create the JSON file for a Synchro Data Source, is to export the definition of an existing data source.

• Create the synchronisation data source in iTop, adjust its parameters (attributes, etc.) to suit your needs
• Use the command line tool dump_tasks.php (available in the toolkit folder to produce the JSON file:

php toolkit/dump_tasks.php --task_name="name of the task to export" > collectors/myCollector.json

Inside your data source definition you can use special placeholders to make the data source configurable by the user of the application, or to adjust its behavior via some special settings:

Sample configuration file:

params.local.xml

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<!--  Local values for parameters. -->
<!--  The values defined in this file have precedence over the ones defined in params.distrib.xml -->
<parameters>
  <itop_url>https://localhost/trunk</itop_url>
  <itop_login>admin</itop_login>
  <itop_password>admin</itop_password>
  <console_log_level>9</console_log_level>
  <contact_to_notify>denis.flaven@combodo.com</contact_to_notify>
  <synchro_user>admin</synchro_user>
  <json_placeholders type="hash">
    <test>Test 1</test>
  </json_placeholders>
</parameters>

Sample Synchro Data Source definition file, notice the use of the $version$, $synchro_user$, $contact_to_notify$ and $test$ placeholders:

Your collector must be a class derived from Collector. It must implement (at least) the Fetch() method. Fetch must return either, for each object to load, an array using the format attribute_code => value or false when the end of the set of objects has been reached.

The array returned by Fetch() must contain:

• an entry primary_key that uniquely identifies the object being synchronized with iTop. The entry can contain whatever unique ID you can obtain from the inventory collection, or a unique identifier generated as a combination of the various fields of the object. It's up to the collector application to guarantee the unicity of this identifier (and its stability in time)
• an entry for each attribute of the object to be loaded in iTop.

The sample code below generates a set of 10 servers, named 'Server 1', 'Server 2' … 'Server 10', and initialized 3 fields of the servers: their name, their organization (always 'Demo') and their description.

main.php

class MyCollector extends Collector
{
  protected $idx;
 
  public function Prepare()
  {
        $bResult = parent::Prepare();
        $this->idx = 0;
        return $bResult;
  }
 
  public function Fetch()
  {
     if ($this->idx < 10)
     {
        $this->idx++;
        return array(
           'primary_key' => $this->idx, 
           'name' => 'Server '.$this->idx, 
           'org_id' => 'Demo', 
           'description' => 'Test Collector'
        );
     }
     return false;
  }
}
 
// Register the collector, as the 1st to run
Orchestrator::AddCollector(1, 'MyCollector');

To register your collector, call the static method Orchestrator::AddCollector(). The two parameters are:

• The order in which the collector should be run (when you need to run several collectors one after the other)
• The name of the class (derived from Collector) in which the collector is implemented.

A collector module can provide default values for its parameters by providing a file params.distrib.xml in the collectors folder. If such a file exists, its values are merged over the equivalent file in the conf directory.

To create a new collector, you can base it on the standard or use one of those recently added Collectors which already does part of the job depending on your data source:

• CSV Collector
• SQL Collector
• JSON Collector (to be released in 2021)

The 'core' folder provides an abstract class SQLCollector which can serve as the basis for quickly creating collectors that retrieve their data via a SQL query.

To create such a collector you need to:

1. Create a class derived from SQLCollector
2. Create the json definition file for the data synchro source
3. Add a configuration parameter (in params.distrib.xml) to define the SQL query to run
4. Register your collector in collectors/main.php

The configuration parameters for the SQL Collectors are:

Let's create a very simple SQL collector which copies the “Notes” documents (class DocumentNote) from one iTop instance to another. Since the collector inherits all its behavior from the base class, the PHP code for the collector is simply:

DocumentNotesCollector.class.inc.php

<?php
class DocumentNoteCollector extends SQLCollector
{
}

Find here a sample of an SQL collector definition file.

Then in params.distrib.xml, add the following entries:

  <sql_database>test</sql_database>
  <sql_login>root</sql_login>
  <sql_password>s3cret</sql_password>
  <documentnotecollector_query>SELECT id as primary_key, name, text, description, status, '2.0' as version, documenttype_id, 1 as org_id FROM view_DocumentNote</documentnotecollector_query>
  <documentnotecollector_ignored_attributes type="array">
    <attribute>location_id</attribute>
    <attribute>version_id</attribute>
  </documentnotecollector_ignored_attributes>

Finally, in collectors/main.php add the following lines:

main.php

<?php
require_once(APPROOT.'collectors/DocumentNoteCollector.class.inc.php');
Orchestrator::AddCollector(1 /* $iRank */, 'DocumentNoteCollector');

The 'core' folder provides an abstract class CSVCollector which can serve as the basis for quickly creating collectors that retrieve their data from CSV files.

To create such a collector you need to:

1. Create a class derived from CSVCollector
2. Create the json definition file for the data synchro source
3. Add a configuration parameter (in params.distrib.xml) to define the CSV file to parse
4. Register your collector in collectors/main.php

The configuration parameters for the CSV Collectors are:

Let's create a very simple CSV collector which copies the “Person” objects (class Person)

Since the collector inherits all its behavior from the base class, the PHP code for the collector is simply:

iTopPersonCsvCollector.class.inc.php

<?php
class iTopPersonCsvCollector extends CSVCollector
{
}

Find here a sample of Collector definition for CSV

Then in params.distrib.xml, add the following entries:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<parameters>
  <iTopPersonCsvCollector_csv>collectors/iTopPersonCsvCollector.csv</iTopPersonCsvCollector_csv>
  <iTopPersonCsvCollector_command>sed -i -e 's|isaac|ISAAC|g' collectors/iTopPersonCsvCollector.csv</iTopPersonCsvCollector_command>
  <iTopPersonCsvCollector_encoding>UTF-8</iTopPersonCsvCollector_encoding>
</parameters>

Finally, in collectors/main.php add the following lines:

main.php

<?php
require_once(APPROOT.'collectors/iTopPersonCsvCollector.class.inc.php');
Orchestrator::AddCollector($index++, 'iTopPersonCsvCollector');

The 'core' folder provides an abstract class JSONCollector which can serve as the basis for quickly creating collectors that retrieve their data from JSON files.

To create such a collector you need to:

1. Create a class derived from JSONCollector
2. Create the json definition file for the data synchro source
3. Add a configuration parameter (in params.distrib.xml) to define the JSON file to parse
4. Register your collector in collectors/main.php

The configuration parameters for the JSON Collectors are:

Let's create a very simple JSON collector which copies the “Person” objects (class Person) from one iTop to another

Since the collector inherits all its behavior from the base class, the PHP code for the collector is simply:

ITopPersonJsonCollector.class.inc.php

<?php
class ITopPersonJsonCollector extends JsonCollector
{
}

Find here a sample for Collector definition file for JSON

Then in params.distrib.xml, add the following entries:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>
<parameters>
        <itoppersonjsoncollector_jsonurl>http://localhost/iTop/webservices/rest.php</itoppersonjsoncollector_jsonurl>
        <itoppersonjsoncollector_jsonpost>
                <auth_user>restuser</auth_user>
                <auth_pwd>restuserpassword</auth_pwd>
                <json_data>{"operation": "core/get", "class": "Person", "key": "SELECT Person WHERE email LIKE '%.com'", "output_fields": "friendlyname, email, first_name, function, name, id, org_id,phone"}</json_data>
                <version>1.3</version>
        </itoppersonjsoncollector_jsonpost>
        <itoppersonjsoncollector_way>objects/*/fields</itoppersonjsoncollector_way>
        <itoppersonjsoncollector_fields>
                <primary_key>id</primary_key>
                <name>name</name>
                <status>status</status>
                <first_name>first_name</first_name>
                <email>email</email>
                <phone>phone</phone>
                <mobile_phone>mobile</mobile_phone>
                <function>function</function>
                <employee_number>employee_number</employee_number>
                <org_id>org_id</org_id>
        </itoppersonjsoncollector_fields>
        <itoppersonjsoncollector_defaults>
                <org_id>Demo</org_id>
                <status>active</status>
        </itoppersonjsoncollector_defaults>
        <json_placeholders>
                <!-- For compatibility with the version 1.1.x of the collector, define the data table names as following:
             <prefix></prefix>
             <persons_data_table>synchro_data_PersonAD</persons_data_table>
             <users_data_table></users_data_table>
              -->
                <prefix>$prefix$</prefix>
                <persons_data_table>synchro_data_person</persons_data_table>
        </json_placeholders>
</parameters>

Finally, in collectors/main.php add the following lines:

main.php

<?php
require_once(APPROOT.'collectors/ITopPersonJsonCollector.class.inc.php');
Orchestrator::AddCollector($index++, 'ITopPersonJsonCollector');

The collector framework provides means to perform some advanced processing for real-life collectors:

• DataMapping for configurable data normalizations
• LookupTable for advanced reconciliations based on multiple fields

Raw data collected by inventory scripts sometimes require a normalization before being imported into iTop, in order to obtain homogenous data. The framework provides the helper class MappingTable for performing simple normalizations tasks.

A mapping table is configured (in the params.xxx.xml configuration file) as an ordered list of patterns, with a value associated to each pattern. The “clean” value returned by the mapping table is the value associated with the first pattern that matches the input value. Patterns are expressed as regular expressions. Values can use the placeholders to refer to some part of the matched pattern (%1$s is the whole pattern, %2$s the first group inside the regular expression, etc.).

Example of configuration (Brand normalization):

  <brand_mapping type="array">
    <!-- Syntax /pattern/replacement where:
      any delimiter can be used (not only /) 
      but the delimiter cannot be present in the "replacement" string
      pattern is a RegExpr pattern
      replacement is a sprintf string in which:
          %1$s will be replaced by the whole matched text,
          %2$s will be replaced by the first matched group, if any group is defined in the RegExpr
          %3$s will be replaced by the second matched group, etc...
    -->
    <pattern>/IBM/IBM</pattern>
    <pattern>/Hewlett.Packard/Hewlett-Packard</pattern>
    <pattern>/Dell/Dell</pattern>
    <pattern>/.*/%1$s</pattern>
  </brand_mapping>

This example file performs the following normalization:

1. Every string containing “IBM” is transformed into “IBM”,
2. Every string containing “Hewlett”, followed by any character, followed by “Packard” is transformed into “Hewlett-Packard”,
3. Every string containing “Dell” is transformed into “Dell”,
4. All other strings are kept as is.

1. Create an instance of the MappingTable class, passing it the name of the XML tag in which to look for its configuration (inside the XML param file)
2. Use the MapValue method to process each value as needed (the second parameter is the default value, when no match is found in the mapping table).

Usage example:

// Turns the raw brand string ('brand_id') into a normalized brand
// Use 'Other' for brands not found in the normalization table
 
class TestCollector extends SQLCollector
{
    protected $oBrandMapping;
 
    public function Prepare()
    {
        $bRet = parent::Prepare();
        // Create the MappingTable once at the initialization of your collector
        $this->oBrandMapping = new MappingTable('brand_mapping');
        return $bRet;
    }
 
    public function Fetch()
    {
        $aData = parent::Fetch();
        if ($aData !== false)
        {
            // Then process each collected brand
            $aData['brand_id'] = $this->oBrandMapping->MapValue($aData['brand_id'], 'Other');
        }
        return $aData;
    }
}

The data synchronization mechanism embedded in iTop is not capable of performing reconciliations based on multiple fields (like searching for a Model based on both the Brand name and the Model name). The LookupTable class provides this reconciliation capability for any number of fields.

The class LookupTable builds a lookup table by retrieving the specified fields of a set of iTop objects, and storing the resulting identifier of the objects in iTop.

An instance of LookupTable is created by specifying an OQL query (the set of iTop objects to retrieve) and the fields of the objects that will be used for the mapping.

Once the LookupTable has been initialized, a call to the Lookup($aData, array(Field1, Field2, …), destField) method will replace in $aData the value of the column destField by identifier of the iTop object whose specified fields match the values passed in $aData as the columns Field1, Field2….

In iTop, the operating system version is represented as a version depending on an OS family object. We can have the following objects in iTop:

• Windows, versions 7.0 and 8.1,
• Debian version 12.0.0.

This will be stored in iTop as shown below:

Now let's imagine that our collector script gives us the two informations: 'Windows' and '8.1.0'. We can store the 'Windows' text string in the 'osfamily_id' field of the data synchro table and configure the synchro data source to perform the reconciliation based on the 'name' (this will properly replace 'Windows' by 1).

But to retrieve the identifier of the version 8.1.0 of Windows (which is 2 in our example) we need both the OS Family ('Windows') and the version number ('8.1.0'). The Synchronization Data Source is not capable of doing this composite lookup, this where the LookupTable comes into play.

$oOSVersionLookup = new LookupTable('SELECT OSVersion', array('osfamily_id_friendlyname', 'name'));

This will build - in memory - the following table:

So if we have in $aData the following values:

Calling:

$oOSVersionLookup->Lookup($aData, array('osfamily_id', 'osversion_id'), 'osversion_id', 0);

Will place in the column 'osversion_id' the result of the lookup for the values $aData['osfamily_id'] and $aData['osversion_id'].

$aData will then contain the following values:

We then have to configure the Synchro Data Source so that it accepts the oversion_id as-is without performing any reconciliation on it.

The advanced reconciliation works by retrieving (via the REST/JSON API), the objects to be matched against the composite key, after the data collection but before pushing the data to iTop. Therefore, in order to use this advanced lookup mechanism, you must tell the framework that the collector has to reprocess the collected data before the actual synchro. This is achieved by overloading the method MustProcessBeforeSynchro of the collector; and returning true.

The collector framework provides two additional methods which can be overloaded:

1. InitProcessBeforeSynchro is called after the data collection, but before starting to reprocess each line of the collected data. This is the plece where to create the LookupTable instance
2. ProcessLineBeforeSynchro is called for each line of the collected data (including the header line of the CSV file, which index is zero)

The following code fragment shows to use cases of lookup tables altogether: one for brand + model and one for OS family + OS version.

protected function MustProcessBeforeSynchro()
{
        // We must reprocess the CSV data obtained from the inventory script
        // to lookup the Brand/Model and OSFamily/OSVersion in iTop
        return true;
}
 
protected function InitProcessBeforeSynchro()
{
        // Retrieve the identifiers of the OSVersion since we must do a lookup based on two fields: Family + Version
        // which is not supported by the iTop Data Synchro... so let's do the job of an ETL
        $this->oOSVersionLookup = new LookupTable('SELECT OSVersion', array('osfamily_id_friendlyname', 'name'));          
 
        // Retrieve the identifiers of the Model since we must do a lookup based on two fields: Brand + Model
        // which is not supported by the iTop Data Synchro... so let's do the job of an ETL
        $this->oModelLookup = new LookupTable('SELECT Model', array('brand_id_friendlyname', 'name'));             
}
 
protected function ProcessLineBeforeSynchro(&$aLineData, $iLineIndex)
{
        // Process each line of the CSV
        if (!$this->oOSVersionLookup->Lookup($aLineData, array('osfamily_id', 'osversion_id'), 'osversion_id', $iLineIndex))
        {
            throw New IgnoredRowException('Unknown OS Version');
        }
        if (!$this->oModelLookup->Lookup($aLineData, array('brand_id', 'model_id'), 'model_id', $iLineIndex))
        {
            throw New IgnoredRowException('Unknown Model');
        }
}

It may happen that the target Data Model has some variants (depending on the set of modules chosen during the installation). If a given attribute can be missing in some configurations, you can tell your collector to accept this variation, by overloading the method AttributeIsOptional. (This is simpler than writing a specific collector for each combination).

If an attribute specified in the JSON definition of the Synchro Data Source is missing, the processing will stop with an error, unless this attribute is declared as optional. In the later case, the name of the skipped attribute is recorded in the protected member variable $this->aSkippedAttributes and the processing continues. The code of the collector can later check the content of the array $this->aSkippedAttributes to determine which fields have to be collected or not.

Example of implementation of AttributeIsOptional as a method of the VirtualMachineCollector class:

public function AttributeIsOptional($sAttCode)
{
        // If the module Service Management for Service Providers is selected during the setup
        // there is no "services_list" attribute on VirtualMachines. Let's safely ignore it.
        if ($sAttCode == 'services_list') return true;
 
        return parent::AttributeIsOptional($sAttCode);
}

When troubleshooting the reconciliation mechanism it is useful to compare the original (raw) values as reported by the inventory script with the result of the reconciliation process. Whenever the method MustProcessBeforeSynchro of a collector returns true, the framework generates two files inthe data subdirectory. You can easily compare the values before/after the lookup by comparing the two CSV files:

1. <collector_name>.raw-<index>.csv: the original data, as produced by the inventory script,
2. <collector_name>-<index>.csv: the reprocessed data, to be uploaded to iTop.