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Dr. Debug's Advice

Matching: debug

Tutorial: How to set your preferred editor to display files in IBM Integration Designer

Dr.Debug Tags: integrationdesigner bpm flow tutorial view iid mediation how-to ibm support debug ‎ 10,345 Views

Good morning friends,

Today I would like to show you, how you can set a specific editor to display a certain file type.

As you all may already know, the IBM Integration Designer (IID) is a development tool where you can use a Graphical User Interface to create and test your applications. For this GUI there is a set of editors available that will display your artifacts in a graphical view instead of a file view.

An example would be the mediation flow, which is opened with the "Mediation Flow Editor" by default when you open the flow.

So, you may run into situations where the view is not available, so the mediation flow might open in the XML file view. First attempt would be to open it from the context menu (BI view >> right click on your mediation flow name >> Open With >> Mediation Flow Editor). If you are as unlucky as I am, this option is not available, and the context menu looks like this:

How can I get my Mediation Flow Editor back? Well, it's not hard if you know how. And I am going to show you how.

All you need to do is to register the editor for the related file type again. In our case the mediation flow (associated to the .mfc file type).

To do so, click on Window >> Preferences and click on the little eraser icon to remove all filters.

Then click on General >> Editors >> File Associations

You will find a list of file types where you can associate the correct editor to the according selected file type.

In our example, we will select the file type .mfc. You will now see the editors in the "Associated editors" section. With the "Add..." button we can now add additional editors for this file type. And we will now add the 'Mediation Flow Editor".

All we need to do now is save our changed and go back to the BI view where we will open the context menu to verify the Mediation Flow Editor was added:

And we're there. It worked.

And if all of that does not help, take two of these and call me in the morning.

Your Doc D.

Modified on by Dr.Debug

What to do when your server list is not available after an upgrade from BPM 7510 to 7512

Dr.Debug Tags: fixlist bpm server debug ps dbschema process_server fix table lsw_server 7512 post-installation upgrade ‎ 12,975 Views

G'day Folks,

Yesterday I came across an interesting issue.

After upgrading from BPM v7.5.1.0 to v7.5.1.2 the Server List in my Process Center was completely empty. The servers were reachable and available though.

When I clicked the Servers tab, I found the following exception in the log:

[3/11/15 12:16:12:430 GMT+01:00] 00000061 wle E CWLLG1274E: An exception occurred.
java.lang.RuntimeException: Unable to locate initialization vector and encrypted data
at com.lombardisoftware.utility.CipherHelper.decrypt(CipherHelper.java: 84)
at com.lombardisoftware.client.persistence.Server.getDecryptedPassword (Server.java:57)
at com.lombardisoftware.repository.server.ObjectManagementServiceImpl.fromServer(ObjectManagementServiceImpl.java:1966)
at com.lombardisoftware.repository.server.ObjectManagementServiceImpl.getServers(ObjectManagementServiceImpl.java:777)
[...]

I looked at the LSW_SERVER table of my BPM database and the server entries were listed.

My first thought was that I was hitting APAR JR42774 - as described in this Technote.
However, a look at the 7.5.1.2 fixlist showed the iFix for this APAR is included in 7.5.1.2.

Reviewing the table definition of my LSW_SERVER table, I saw that the password column had a definition of varchar(256), although after the installation of FP2 (or JR42774) it was supposed to have varchar(1000). So something must have went wrong during the installation of the fixpack - most likely during the post-install steps where the db schema was upgraded.

After I updated the schema (as described in the post install steps) I nulled the passwords in the LSW_SERVER table, as the heartbeat would simply re-add them afterwards.
And voilá - the servers were listed again.

And if you are facing the same issue but the above steps do not help, take two of these and call me in the morning.
Your Doc D.

Modified on by Dr.Debug

Tutorial: How to investigate startup issues of Eclipse based products where the Java Process hangs during the start-up

Dr.Debug Tags: error equinox iid startup freeze eclipse hang log debug osgi ‎ 18,868 Views

Dear fellow Debuggers,

The other day I ran into a problem, where my IBM Integration Designer (IID) did not start properly. I tried to start the application, but the startup never finished and was hung. Frozen - no way to stop it except killing the process. Alternatively I could have waited for it to crash..

If it does crash during the workspace initialization phase, a log file is written to the workspace/.metadata/ directory. The file is named ".log" and is always worth a look. In my case, I saw the following exception:

!ENTRY org.eclipse.osgi 2 0 2015

!MESSAGE While loading class "org.eclipse.core.runtime.RegistryFactory", thread "Thread[Start Level Event Dispatcher,5,main]" timed out waiting (5000ms) for thread "Thread[Component Resolve Thread,5,main]" to finish starting bundle "org.eclipse.equinox.registry_3.5.0.v20100503 [5910]". To avoid deadlock, thread "Thread[Start Level Event Dispatcher,5,main]" is proceeding but "org.eclipse.core.runtime.RegistryFactory" may not be fully initialized.

!STACK 0

org.osgi.framework.BundleException: State change in progress for bundle "reference:file:/C:/IBM/SDPShared/plugins/org.eclipse.equinox.registry_3.5.0.v20100503.jar" by thread "Component Resolve Thread".

                at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.AbstractBundle.beginStateChange(AbstractBundle.java:1077)

                at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.internal.core.AbstractBundle.start(AbstractBundle.java:282)

                at org.eclipse.osgi.framework.util.SecureAction.start(SecureAction.java:417)

This output points towards an issue with the equinox registry.

If it do Org.eclipse.equinox.registry is one of the first eclipse plugins started and usually indicates that a bundle was not loaded properly.
So how can we debug this further?

Create a simple file in any text editor of your choice and name it ".options" (without the quotes).

Copy/paste the following content into this file:

/debug = true
org.eclipse.ui/debug = true
org.eclipse.core.runtime/debug = true
org.eclipse.ui/trace/graphics = true

Save your changes to the .options file
Place the .options file into the IID root directory where the eclipse.exe resides
Open a command line window and start IID using the following one-liner:

C:\IBM\IID\v8.5\eclipsec.exe -product com.ibm.wbit.feature.ide -debug -consolelog -vm C:\IBM\IID\v8.5\jdk\jre\bin\java.exe -Xquickstart -Xms512m-Xmx1024m -Xmnx64m -Xgcpolicy:gencon -Xscmx96m -Xshareclasses:name=none,nonfatal -XX:MaxPermSize=512M -Xverify:none -Declipse.p2.verifyPlan=false -cp C:\:\IBM\IID\v8.5\plugins\org.eclipse.equinox.launcher_1.1.1.R36x_v20101122_1400.jar org.eclipse.equinox.launcher.Main -debug -product com.ibm.wbit.feature.ide > IID_debug.log 2>&1
This will generate an additional IID_debug.log file in your <IID_install_root> directory. Review this log for further clues.

In my case, a simple restart of my machine and then starting IID with the -clean option resolved the error.

A pretty cool overview over the available Eclipse debug strings can be found here.

And if nothing helps, take two of these and call me in the morning.

Yours,
Dr. D

Modified on by Dr.Debug

Tutorial: How to investigate startup issues of Eclipse based products where the Java Process terminates unexpectedly during the start-up

Dr.Debug Tags: im crash iid howto log tutorial java trace dr.debug eclipse debug ‎ 10,850 Views

Good morning friends of the hands-on debugging,

Some of you may have already encountered such a situation. You get your morning coffee, boot up your workstation, you start your IBM Integration Designer (IID) and bang - there it is. A crash notification. What a good start in your day.
Right after you started the application, it crashes and presents you an Eclipse pop-up window like the following:

Java was started but returned exit code=1

If you have not encountered this yet - Congratulations! I would still recommend reading this post, maybe some days you will need this .

So, what's next?

Step 1: Prepare yourself for some debug fun. If your coffee is gone, I recommend getting another one, then continuing with the below steps. If you still have coffee left, move right on to the next step.

Step 2: Did this installation ever work or did you just install it? If this error shows up after a new installation of the Eclipse based product (here IID), check out the installation logs to make sure it was installed without any exceptions. To do so, have a look at the IBM Installation Manager log files under <Installation_Manager_Install_Dir>/logs

In my case:

Open the index.xml file and review all logs linked in there for any exceptions or failures during the installation.

Failed or partially failed installations may cause such statup issues.

Step 3: Did anybody mess with your Eclipse startup parameters? If this is not a new installation and the exception happened all of a sudden, maybe some JVM arguments were changed and are hence causing this crash. Always a good candidate is the -Xmx value, which specifies the maximum memory allocation pool for the Java Virtual Machine (JVM). A lot of users still think: The more, the better! Unfortunately they overtune the JVM and the memory allocation is simply too large for the JVM to be successfully created. If changes were made to the JVM settings, please revert those changes back to the default values (you can for example compare them to a working or untouched system). Then try to launch your Eclipse based application again.

Step 4: Create Javacore log files to gain more insight into the root cause of the crash. As Eclipse is still in the start-up process when the crash occurs, the JVM errors cannot be written to the Eclipse error logs under <workspace_root>/.metadata/.log
Hence we need another way to get more information about the root cause. Open your eclipse.ini file (located in the <install_root> directory) and add the following line under -vmargs opt:

-Xdump:java:events=vmstop

This should enforce the creation of a javacore.txt file in case of a JVM crash. In our case here, you will find it in the IID root directory after the next restart.

And if nothing helps, take two of these and call me in the morning.

Your Dr. D

Modified on by Dr.Debug

Tutorial: How to tackle performance issues for BPM Coaches

Dr.Debug Tags: har performance slow bpm debug loading coaches long coach ‎ 11,184 Views

Good morning, Fellas!

Today, I will tell you why my last posting with the video of how to capture http traffic is so important.

You all probably know the symptoms - you run your Coach and it's loading. You check the news in a separate tab, you jump back to the Coach, still loading,

loading aaaaaaand loading. Okay, I am exaggerating a bit, but sometimes the loading times feel like they are taking forever.

Now, before contacting IBM Support to help you solving your performance issue, I wanted to share some steps you can use to further diagnose your problem.

And for that, we will need this *.HAR (HTTP Archive) file that is being generated.

Now, to look at this HAR file, you will require an HAR Viewer (http://www.softwareishard.com/blog/har-viewer/).

Now simply drag&drop your HAR file onto the page and click on the Preview tab.

Here you will see all the requests with request/response, as well as header information, the response codes to the requests and most importantly - the timings.

Since we have long loading times for our Coach, we are particularly interested in those loading times.

A good indicator is the bar on the right hand side. If it is purple and the number given next to it is quite small (it's the actual time this request took in milliseconds), that's good.

Just some general remarks:

The purple bar indicates the wait time, i.e. the time the client waited for a response from the server. The smaller, the better. Of course it depends on the size of the request, network latency, server load etc).

You may see a brownish bar that indicates Blocking time. This is the time the request spent waiting for a network connection.

Blue bars indicate the time the DNS lookup took, green is the time it took to create the actual TCP connection.

Red bars show the time spent on sending the HTTP request to the server, and as said earlier, purple is the waiting time for the response.

They grey bar stands for the time it took to receive and read the complete response from the server.

In some cases you might even see SSL timings, which show how long the handshake etc took.

A good sample can be found here.

Just open the twisties at the bottom named "Cuzillion" and you can review these timings.

Or you can reload this page, grap the HAR from your browser console and it might look something like this:

I had a patient the other day, whose HAR file showed something very interesting. The actual waiting times were pretty small, all only a couple of milliseconds. Yet he still told me his Coach was ailing. There were pages and pages of requests. I stopped counting after 200. The farther i scrolled down in the list, I noticed that the brown bar continuously increased.

Brown bar? Yes! Blocking time! What was that again?

Exactly! The time waiting for a connection. I am not a plumber, but this smelled like a clogged drain. To use the medical term - the patient was probably suffering of constipation.

I asked my patient to take the longest taking call (it was a REST call - I could see that from the request details) - and run it against the server from the REST-API tester while capturing the HTTP traffic again. In isolation, no other requests, just this one.

The result: It finished in no time. So we knew it was not the DB or Server that had a problem with that request. This supported the drain theory.

What can cause such a constipation are the connection- and thread-pool settings for your server. In other words: If you eat more than you can egest, at some point you will feel constipated.

I gave him the advice to increase the pool sizes in an iterative process, always monitoring the performance of his Coach while doing so.

And voilá - the clogged drain was free again.

And if none of this helps, take two of these

and call me in the morning.

Your Dr. D

Modified on by Dr.Debug

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Dr. Debug's Advice

Tutorial: How to set your preferred editor to display files in IBM Integration Designer

What to do when your server list is not available after an upgrade from BPM 7510 to 7512

Tutorial: How to investigate startup issues of Eclipse based products where the Java Process hangs during the start-up

Tutorial: How to investigate startup issues of Eclipse based products where the Java Process terminates unexpectedly during the start-up

Tutorial: How to tackle performance issues for BPM Coaches