Programming Jabber

Managing the Configuration

Now that we’ve had a tour of the components and have an idea what sorts of configurations are possible, you may be wondering whether there’s a way to retain some sort of overview of the actual XML. Dropping component instance definitions in and out of the configuration file is somewhat tedious, and certainly when editing such a large file, it’s not difficult to lose sense of direction and comment out or edit the wrong section.

Help is at hand, in the form of the <jabberd:include/> tag. This tag comes from the same stable as <jabberd:cmdline/> and provides the Jabber server administrator with ways to better manage the XML configuration.

The contents of a file specified with the <jabberd:include/> tag are imported (included) in the position that the <jabberd:include/> tag occupies. Depending on what the root tag in the file to be included is, the import is done in one of two ways:

• If the root tag matches the parent tag of <jabberd:include/>, the contents of the file minus the root tag are included.

• If the root tag does not match the parent tag of <jabberd:include/>, then the entire contents of the file are included.

For example, if we have a section like this in the jabber.xml file:

...
<conference xmlns="jabber:config:conference">
  <public/>
  <vCard>
    <FN>yak Chatrooms</FN>
    <DESC>This is a public chatroom service.</DESC>
    <URL>http://yak/chat</URL>
  </vCard>
  ...
  <jabberd:include>./rooms.xml</jabberd:include>
</conference>
...

and the content of ./rooms.xml ...