[Chimera-users] non-GUI use of Chimera

[Charles Moad]

	We do not need the ability to issue requests to a specific instance of 
chimera.  I changed the preferences and I was having new instances of 
chimera appear for each request, but that changed after restarting chimera.
	The current solution we are using involves the following.  You open a 
web page which is a python/cgi script that prompts for input.  Using 
SOAPpy, we issue a call to a web service function to do the rendering. 
The SOAP response is a pointer to the image url.  The SOAP server just 
generates a chimerax file based on the request and spawns a chimera_send 
process.  Other than the fact that we must have chimera attached to an 
Xserver everything works really well.

Thanks,
	Charlie

Thomas Goddard wrote:
> Hi Charlie,
> 
>   You should be able to use sys.exit() in a *.chimerax script to quit Chimera.
> The sys.exit() call raises SystemExit.  Unfortunately the code that runs the
> *.chimerax file is catching the SystemExit.  This is a bug in Chimera 1951
> that we will fix.  For now you can use "import os" and "os._exit(0)".
> 
>   The chimera_send script will start a new Chimera if it does not find
> one already running that is accepting connections.  By default Chimera
> does not accept connections.  The easiest way to change this is to
> start Chimera by hand and use Favorites/Preferences/Web Data to turn
> on "Accept Web Data".  Then press the Preferences Save button to save
> this setting in the user's Chimera preferences file
> (~/.chimera/preferences).  (Note you'll need to do this as the user
> that Chimera runs with from the web server.)  You can also change the
> "Confirm open of commands or code" preference to "never".  This will
> prevent the Chimera warning dialog asking whether you really want to
> execute the *.chimerax file.  You can also save this setting.
> Making these settings may pose a serious security risk.  There are
> mechanisms to allow only the same user that is running Chimera to
> run *.chimerax files but I do not know how strong the security is.
> Dan Greenblatt (dan at cgl.ucsf.edu) wrote the code and would know.
> 
>   As it works now, if you wish to send commands to an already running
> Chimera, you cannot specify which instance of Chimera.  So it is not
> possible to communicate with multiple instances of Chimera as you might
> want to support multiple web sessions.  Dan Greenblatt may have ideas
> for addressing this.
> 
>      Tom
> 
>