Admin Tool Features

This section describes the following features of the Admin Tool:

• Permissions

• Displaying Exceptions

• Identifying Registry Objects

• The Effect of Locale on Specifying Names

• Case Sensitivity

Permissions

When you use the Admin Tool, you can perform only those actions that are allowed for the user whose key alias and password you specified when you started the tool. Only a user with the role of administrator can perform commands that make changes to objects that the user does not own. See Creating an Administrator for details.

Displaying Exceptions

The Admin Tool enables you to avoid viewing long stack traces when a command fails.

When a command fails, the Admin Tool prints the first line of the stack trace and the following message:

An error occurred when executing the function.  Use the show exception 
command to view messages.

If you need more information, execute the show exception command next to see the full stack trace.

The show exception command always displays the stack trace of the immediately preceding command.

Identifying Registry Objects

The primary way to identify registry objects is by name. However, you normally identify RegistryPackage objects by the path from the registry root to the RegistryPackage. For example, /registry/userData is the path to the userData RegistryPackage.

Some matches for names support wildcards. Use a question mark (?) to match a single character. Use an asterisk (*) to match zero or more characters.

Some commands (for example, cd and chown) support identifying objects by their Uniform Resource Name (URN), which must include a leading urn:. For example, urn:uuid:2702f889-3ced-4d49-82d1-e4cd846cb9e4 is a valid URN.

The chown and cp commands also support the use of %number to refer to a User listed by a previous users command.

For some commands, you can enter names that contain spaces by enclosing the entire name in double quotes or by preceding each space in the name by a backslash.

The select command supports the use of SQL wildcards: the percent sign (%) to match multiple characters, and the underscore (_) to match a single character.

The Effect of Locale on Specifying Names

A RegistryObject (or a RegistryPackage) can have multiple names, each of which is associated with a different locale.

The paths and object names that you specify are evaluated with respect to the current locale only. When you attempt to select by name a registry object that has multiple names, the Registry attempts to match the name that you provide against only one alternative for the registry object’s name (the choice whose locale most closely matches the current locale), not against all the multiple names for the registry object.

For example, suppose the current RegistryPackage has a member object that has two names, each associated with a different locale: red in the en (English) locale and rouge in the fr (French) locale. When the current locale is en, the command ls rouge does not display that member object, but when the locale is fr (or one of its variants), it does.

Case Sensitivity

Command names and literal parameters that are recognized by the Admin Tool are not case sensitive. For example, ls, Ls, and LS are equivalent.

Options to which you provide the value are passed literally to the code that uses the option.