Protégé behind corporate proxy: time-out with registry.api.identifiers.org:443

[jpi-seb]

We use Protégé 5.6.3 behind a corporate HTTP proxy, in a Windows 10 environnement.
We implemented the JVM proxy settings in the launcher (Protege.l4j.ini and run.bat):

-Dhttp.proxyHost=...
-Dhttp.proxyPort=...
-Dhttp.nonProxyHosts="..."
-Dhttps.proxyHost=...
-Dhttps.proxyPort=...
-Dhttps.nonProxyHosts="..."

However, after launching Protégé and loading our ontology, it hangs when opening the first class in the editor.
Logs indicate a warning causing a 30 seconds time-out on this operation:

WARN  15:00:28  [IdentifiersDotOrg] Error retrieving identifiers.org namespaces: Connect to registry.api.identifiers.org:443 [registry.api.identifiers.org/35.186.209.151] failed: Connection timed out: connect

Our investigations pointed to this class: https://github.com/protegeproject/protege/blob/master/protege-editor-owl/src/main/java/org/protege/editor/owl/model/identifiers/IdentifiersDotOrg.java
It seems that this code tries to send and HTTP GET to an URL, without applying the JVM proxy configuration that we specified in the launcher.

Could you fix this problem in the next release ?
Thanks you in advance.

[gouttegd]

A cursory search suggests that indeed the Apache HttpClient does not honour the JVM proxy configuration. We’ll need to either configure it so that it explicitly uses the proxy, or switch the IdentifiersDotOrg class to the JDK HTTP client entirely.

[jpi-seb]

Thanks Damien for your answer.
Using the method useSystemProperties() in the Apache HttpClientBuilder, before calling build(), should do the trick as explained here: https://hc.apache.org/httpcomponents-client-4.5.x/current/httpclient/apidocs/org/apache/http/impl/client/HttpClientBuilder.html#useSystemProperties()
It supports HTTP proxy settings passed as JVM arguments, and many more options.

[gouttegd]

Thanks for the pointer. Looks like the most straightforward solution indeed.

I don’t have a proxy setup to test. Would you be willing to test the fix yourself? You can find a preliminary 5.6.5-alpha1 build with the putative fix here: https://incenp.org/files/softs/protege/5.6/

[jpi-seb]

Thanks for the link to the alpha. I've just tested it in our corporate environnement, behind the HTTP proxy.
I can confirm that is works perfectly now: no warning in the logs, Protégé is not hanging any more while opening the first class in the editor, after having loaded an ontology.

I tested the fix with both method:

• Modify Protege.l4j.ini to add HTTP proxy settings in JVM args, and starting Protégé with Protege.exe ;
• Modify run.bat to add HTTP proxy settings in JVM args, and starting Protégé with run.bat.

It works in both cases 👍

[gouttegd]

Great, thanks for testing. I just pushed the fix to master, it will be included in the next release.