Dutch tilt

SoapUI install directory detection / mockservice execution script

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2011-11-30T10:53:45+01:00

For some 'homework' i needed a (bash) script to start the soapUI mockservicerunner on Oracle Linux which could start the mock service regardless of the soapUI installation directory. I could not find a single reference to the installation directory, and therefore wrote some code to find the installation location, To speed up the detection the script first searches the directories where you might expect to find soapUI, secondly in less logical locations. When found, the soapUI installation directory is stored in the script itself to speed up future executions of the script. Here it is, have fun !

Defaulting to Audit view for BPEL instances in Oracle BPEL 10g

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2011-11-23T21:00:00+01:00

Although FMW 11g is around for some time, there are still organizations running on SOA Suite 10g. So maybe this tip is still useful for some of you. When testing my not-yet-quite-finished BPEL processes on my local BPEL server i am not interested in the manage view when selecting a BPEL instance. What i need is the audit view of my BPEL process. Since most of the BPEL Console is based on JSP, you just have to find the right jsp-file in the container...

Deduplication or extracting unique elements using XSL

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2011-10-28T20:37:17+02:00

When searching for an efficient way to de-duplicate elements in a BPEL process, i found several blogs and communities on the web showing examples how to use the XSL key and generate-id functions to extract unique elements. Only none of them explained the science behind the magic. Here a more elaborate explanation how the extraction of unique elements, based on a chosen combination of key elements, from a XML message works.

Updated: SOA Suite 11g R1 on OL x86-64 in VM Ware Fusion

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2011-10-07T06:49:18+02:00

A revised version of the installation guide for Oracle Fusion Middleware on Oracle Linux in a Virtual Machine is available. This document is based on the SOA Suite PS 4, Oracle 11gR2 DB, Oracle Linux 5u7 x86-64 and OEPE for x86-64.

The document SOA Suite 11g on OL 5u7 x86-64 in VMWare.pdf can be downloaded here.

Oracle Linux 5U7 on VMware Fusion 4

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2011-09-28T20:13:09+02:00

When installing Oracle Linux 5U7 as a Guest OS on VMWare fusion 4, you will probably run into the "no module ehci-hcd found for kernel 2.6.32-200.13.1.el5uek" during the VMWare Tools installation process. This error is caused by missing usb kernel modules in /lib/modules/2.6.32-200.13.1.el5uek. You can easily solve this by opening a Terminal session, substitute the user by root (su - root) and executing the command below.

cp /lib/modules/2.6.18-274.el5/kernel/drivers/usb/host/?hci-hcd.ko \
/lib/modules/2.6.32-200.13.1.el5uek/kernel/drivers/usb/host

Now you can start the installation of VMWare tools by executing

./vmware-install.pl

Reading not XMLEncoded XML into Java Beans

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2011-09-21T22:04:50+02:00

For a small Java project is was searching for a standard JDK Class to read a XML configuration file into a Java bean. Important was that the structure of the XML file was maintainable by humans using external editors and not necessarily all elements in the XML file had to match attributes in the Java bean(s) wherein the contents of the XML file is stored. The XMLDecoder class in the java.beans package only can de-serialize objects encoded using the XMLEncoder class and therefore is less useful for his purpose.

Based on Java's SAXParser and a relative simple handler extending DefaultHandler, i was able to parse an external editable XML into a Java bean holding (ArrayLists of) other beans as attributes, also capable of holding one or more Java Beans as attributes.

Oracle BPEL 10g XSL Cache Initialization

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2011-06-01T16:20:15+02:00

In my current project the BPEL development team, wherein i participate, maintains and develops BPEL processes on 10g. The complexity of these processes are not the processes itself but merely the applied transformations in these processes which also contain custom XSL functions. Testing of the XSL transformations within the IDE (JDeveloper) therefore is in many cases not an option. Alternatively the whole service has to be deployed to a local installed BPEL server and tested by instantiating the service. The main disadvantage here is that BPEL keeps it XSL files in cache, even the XSL files which were re-deployed. So when testing a re-deployed service with modified XSL files, the results of the transformations are unchanged, simply because the 'old' version of the XSL files are still in memory. To load the modified XSL files in memory the BPEL server has to be re-started after each deployment. When having to go though multiple iterations of testing and therefore time-consuming restarts of the local BPEL server can be quite annoying.

How to: SOA Suite 11g R1 on Oracle Linux in VM Ware Fusion

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2011-02-04T13:45:25+01:00

When i started reading the books ‘Getting Started with ORACLE SOA Suite 11g R1’ (by Heidi Buelow et al.) and ‘SOA Suite 11G Handbook’ (by Lucas Jellema) i needed a running SOA Suite 11g environment to be able to do the exercises. As a Mac user i use VM Ware to virtualize my educational environments, preferably on a Linux operating system to minimize the cost of licenses and reduce the overhead of the guest operating system on my host operating system. Both books do contain installation guidelines, but are focussed on installation of the SOA Suite 11g on a Microsoft Windows operating system. Although the getting started handbook does give you some hints how to tune the environment, the performance, on a system with the suggested 3Gb RAM, is to low to consider it workable.

Therefore i wrote a document describing step-by-step how to get an up and running SOA Suite 11g R1 environment with a minimal environment.

Using WS Addressing in BPEL Partner Links

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-11-22T16:30:16+01:00

The fullWSAddressing partnerlink property is available in Oracle BPEL since 10.1.3.3. When set to true this property enables you to set the WSA addressing properties From, Action, To, and FaultTo, through the deployment descriptor parameters. After enabling the partnerlink property i have not been able to find any change in the deployment descriptors or web.xml to utilize the WSA headers and had to search for an alternative solution. The Web Services Adressing 1.0 recommendation also describes the ReplyTo, MessageID, RelatesTo, RelatesTo/@RelationshipType messaging addressing properties in addition to the previously mentioned headers, which are not made available through the fullWSAddressing partnerlink property. You can however make use of all WS Addressing properties when calling external webservices through a BPEL Partner Link. I will explain in a few steps how to build a BPEL process making use of WS Addressing without usage of the fullWSAddressing partnerlink property.

Public final

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-12-13T16:39:20+01:00

After 18 months following the Java Certified Professional Program at the Open University I finally may call myself a certified java developer. In the past months subjects like UML, Object Orientation, Java Collection Framework, Swing, JSP, JSTL, EL, Struts and Spring have come by. The last assignment of this CPP was designing and building a basic online auction system. On top of the minimum requirements I added some extra features; Category administration, member registration confirmation and password reset through links in e-mail, article images, SMS bid notification and an automatic invoice generation system.

If interested, you can experience it here.

Recently published; Oracle Siebel CRM 8 Installation and Management

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-08-17T12:53:12+02:00

Alexander Hansal, author of the blog Siebel Essentials, wrote the book Oracle Siebel CRM 8 Installation and Management. The Books is written with the role of a system administrator in mind who has to ramp up quickly on Siebel CRM, focusing on typical tasks such as installing and managing the Siebel CRM infrastructure. The publisher, Packt Publishing, sent me a free copy and asked me to write a review for this book. I will try to read the 572 pages in the next few weeks and come back with a review here and on amazon.com.

You can have your own preview here.

Getting top active Siebel views

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-06-24T18:29:59+02:00

A last one to conclude this series of Siebel CRM monitoring framework articles. Just to show how relative simple it is to build your own custom Siebel monitors. Every active user accessing Siebel using the web client interface has a session which is maintained by a dedicated Siebel task. These sessions are listed in the Server Session view on the Server Administration Screen. In this screen you can see that every session has a unique task identifier. When selecting the State Value detailed view all state values belonging to the task associated with the session are shown. If the session belongs to a Siebel Object Manager, one of the state values is View Name containing the name of the current Siebel view. The Business Components associated to the views are SA-VBC Session and Server Task State Value. By querying all active session in Business Component SA-VBC Session and counting the number of views per view name in Business Component Server Task State Value you get a aggregated list of all active views.

Monitoring Siebel Tasks and MTServers

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-06-15T09:27:40+02:00

Active Siebel multithreaded components like the SRBroker or ObjectManager usually consist of multiple MultiThreaded Servers (MTServers) and Tasks to handle multiple simultaneous requests or Siebel sessions. More common naming for a Siebel is a MTServer is processes, which is typically independent, have a separate address space and can be identified on an operating system by its process id (PID). Siebel Tasks are threads spawned by a process and do run in the same memory space as its parent process. Per multithreaded component the number of minimum, default or maximum processes (MTServers) and threads (Tasks) can be configured by the component parameters. The number of processes and tasks are component parameters, not process or tasks parameters. Important to comprehend is that the actual number of threads is distributed over the instantiated processes.

I have not yet seen a monitor which can monitor the distribution of the Tasks for MTServers and visualize this in a clear way. So therefore i gave it a shot to create one myself.

Java class monitoring Siebel CRM workflow processes

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-06-03T10:16:27+02:00

In my previous post i introduced a simple monitoring framework for Siebel CRM written in Java. Since it is a framework adding monitors should be a straightforward process. To put it to the test i wrote the Java class SBLWorkflowProcMonitor extending the abstract class SBLMonitor to monitor; the number of workflows in a specific state, average duration of the workflows and the number of completed workflows per time unit.

A simple Java based Siebel CRM monitoring framework

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-05-31T17:55:54+02:00

I have built some monitoring scripts in Perl and Shell in the past years, of which most needed a lot of code to realize an interface with the application and exception handling functions to catch and process every possible error i could think of. In other words, it was quite a challenge to get a stable and reliable working monitoring script. Besides that, not every customer had a Perl interpreter installed on their servers or ran Siebel on another platform than Unix (in all its variations). Since most of the scripts do retrieve the information from the Siebel server manager, i questioned myself if there was not a better way to develop siebel monitors. Monitors which could retrieve information from Siebel using an API instead from wrapper scripts around command-line utilities. Java is more generic available on any platform and Oracle offers a SiebelDataBean which enables to interface with Siebel CRM. So i gave myself the challenge to design and develop a small monitoring framework to monitor the Siebel CRM application which should be easily extendible.

BI Publisher Siebel Security Model & Siebel LDAPSecAdapt

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-03-26T19:17:24+01:00

Since the release of Siebel 8.1.1.1 and BI Publisher 10.1.3.4.1 a new security model is introduced in BI Publisher, Siebel Security. When using the Siebel Security model, BI Publisher relies on Siebel for its authentication and authorization. Siebel employees can be authorized to generate reports by assigning them the necessary responsibilities. Oracle officially only supports the Siebel Security model when using DB Security for Siebel and the use of the BI Publisher LDAP security model when using LDAP Security Adapter for Siebel. In fact Oracle names the combination of Siebel LDAPSecAdpt with BI Publisher Siebel Security model a 'mixed authentication method' and has not certified and/or validated this method yet. The BI Publisher LDAP Security model has one disadvantage, it requires hardcoded LDAP Security Groups like XMLP_DEVELOPER. Groups names like these probably do not follow your company naming standards for LDAP objects and are therefore not allowed. If so this immediately makes BI Publishers LDAP Security Model not suitable for implementation in your production environment. If you have a better understanding of how the
Siebel Security model works, it is fairly simple to implement this security model when using the LDAPSecAdpt for Siebel.

Enabling SSL for BI Publisher - Siebel Security Model

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2010-02-27T15:51:01+01:00

In Siebel 8.1.1.1 and BI Publisher 10.1.3.4.1 a new security model, Siebel Security, is introduced. In this security model BI Publisher uses the Siebel responsibilities as functional roles. How to deploy this is excellent described in the Blog Siebel Essentials. When the Siebel Security Model in BI Publisher requests the available roles (responsibilities) in Siebel, the username and password of the Siebel administrator and the Siebel user are passed in clear-text in the header and body of the webservice call. It would be more secure when you could make a secure (HTTPS) webservice call to your Siebel Web Server. This article describes how you can achieve this.

Adding a dynamic iChat status icon

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2009-02-03T10:25:25+01:00

There are numerous examples on the web how to show your iChat status on your webpage. What i did not like about those examples was that the iChat status on the webpage only was refreshed when the pages was reloaded. Using a small javascript you can easily make your iChat status dynamic so that shows your iChat status almost realtime.

(Siebel) logfile monitoring

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2009-01-20T11:04:03+01:00

The log-adapter project was initiated because a company where i was working on a project, decided that application and system log-files should conform to their newly defined standard. Reasoning behind this was that defining, IBM/Tivoli TEC, log-file formats and corresponding rulesets for each type of application was costly due to complexity of developing, and managing (-procedures) of those rules, formats and adapters. Due to this complexity the time between request and implementation of a new log-file adapter could be weeks or months. By implementing one standardized logfile-format and rule-set the time between requests and implementation of monitoring new log-files could be considerably shortened. This standardization of logfile-monitoring decreased the lead time of implementation requests for the department responsible for monitoring, but charged other departments with the challenge to standardize their application and system logs. Many applications and systems do not allow you to modify how content is written to log-files. This log-file adapter allows you to filter and transform messages from multiple (multi-line) log-files on several systems into one standardized logfile.

Integrating PHPlist confirmation pages into Rapidweaver

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2009-01-27T11:18:05+01:00

The PHPlist application is a powerfull and free tool to manage mailinglists. It can also easily integrated into your Rapidweaver based website and display the the pages in the chosen Rapidweaver Theme style when using iFrame pages. Only the confirmation pages which users have to open when they subscribe for the first time or changed their subscription are not shown in the chosen Rapidweaver Them style. I found an easy solution using a small Javascript.

Synchronizing component parameters

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2009-01-05T11:58:00+01:00

In large Siebel environments, a specific function or component is mostly dispersed over multiple physical or logical systems. The load over these systems is then distributed using a load balancer to make it transparent to the end-user or any other application. The challenge for the administrator here is to keep the systems synchronized, otherwise the function or application will behave randomly. When having Siebel components installed on multiple systems, compverify.pl can help you out to detect differences and synchronize component parameters between multiple Siebel systems. Another useful application of compverify is making snapshots of component parameters and store those for future reference.

Monitoring the Siebel application IV

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2008-10-13T16:29:00+02:00

How to monitor Siebel user sessions based on TCP connections

Monitoring the Siebel application III

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2008-10-06T07:02:00+02:00

How to monitor Siebel component tasks in Siebel

Monitoring the Siebel application II

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2008-10-03T16:12:00+02:00

A monitor for detecting runaway processes.

Monitoring the Siebel application I

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2008-10-01T06:41:00+02:00

A monitor to detect the number of successful logins into the Siebel application over a specified interval.

Thinking in Java on Mac OS X

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2009-01-23T20:24:29+01:00

How to install the source code from Bruce Eckels book the “Annotated Solution Guide for Thinking in Java 4th edition” on OS X.

Siebcmdserver

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2008-03-03T16:15:00+01:00

Deliver restricted access to the Siebel servermanager (srvrmgr) to many users or applications, e.g. Mercury BAC or MAM, without installing the srvrmgr utility by sharing one srvrmgr session.

Slideshow 2 and Lightbox integration into Rapidweaver

mailbox@petervannes.nl — 2008-11-24T22:28:26+01:00

How to integrate Slideshow 2 and Lightbox into Rapidweaver.