There you are, planning an application and platform upgrade for your IBM TRIRIGA installation and you think everything is working just fine. You roll out to production and for the first few days afterwards, all is quiet. Suddenly, out of the blue, you notice that the floor plan graphics no long render. Where the graphics should appear, you do not see the No Graphic Available message where the graphic used to appear. What you do notice is that, in the lower right hand corner "Error 2" is displayed and the rest of the space where the graphic would normally appear is blank. This blog post will address one of the potential causes of this problem and also a means of finding the problem before you upgrade your production environment.

In order to determine the root cause, we need to know what the errors are that are referenced in that "Error 2" text in the graphics section. Clicking on the text will open a pop-up box that contains the actual error messages (2, hence the "Error 2") related to the issue. That alone will not help the support team diagnose the problem. The errors should indicate an MID number. That MID number should also be found in the server log with a time stamp associated with when the graphic should have been rendered. In a issue I was working for a client, we determined from that information that there was a problem with the graphic layer configuration records. In particular, they were missing their corresponding IBS_SPEC entries. This required removing the records from the database using SQL run against the database back end. The application is unable to delete the records because the application relies heavily on the IBS_SPEC table entries to perform the actions necessary to delete the records. Once the records were removed and the layer configuration records rebuilt, the graphics once again started to display.

Great, that fixed the immediate problem, but how do you prevent this from happening in the future? When planning your upgrade, you need to insure that all graphical functionality is tested before making the decision to roll the upgrade out to your production environment. Upgrade plans should always include CAD Integrator testing. In older releases of the IBM CAD Integrator tool and the IBM TRIRIGA Platform, there was a great deal of backward compatibility. As a result of this backward compatibility, most clients did not include steps to insure that graphical elements were unaffected and, instead, focused on the business process logic to insure that the non-graphical data was correct. With the later releases of IBM TRIRIGA (3.3 or later, to be more precise) the CAD Integrator tool became much more tightly coupled with the platform release. Best practice for upgrade planning should now include upgrading the CAD Integrator tool to the release that was created specifically for the platform release to which you are upgrading. As a result of adding the CAD Integrator to your upgrade plans, you should naturally expect to add more time to the validation of all CAD related graphics that appear in your IBM TRIRIGA instance.

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