Manipulating string is probably the most frequent operation we need to do when transforming data. Thus, I’d like to talk a bit about string concatenation in WebMethods. The most basic way to add two strings is to use the pub.string.concat service in the WmPublic package as shown below:
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| Image 01. pub.string.concat service |
There’s
been quite a bit of talk recently on the web about the new partnership with MapBox
to deliver new map capabilities to Cognos Analytics (and there isn’t much talk
about the discontinuation of support for ArcGIS in this new version). I decided
to spend a bit more time to learn about the map functionality in this new
Cognos version. The best way to get to know something is by doing it. So I
cooked up some “real” requirements and tried to build a few dashboards.
The first
one, I like to see whether a change in average temperature will affect the
number of calls to fix break/leak issues related to water supply piping system,
and whether a change in average rainfall will affect number of calls related to
sewage/drainage systems. The data should be broken down to suburb and post-code
level. Below is what I got:
For the second
one, I like to compare the average planned vs actual labour hours spent on maintenance work, and the amount of time field workers spent to get to work location vs the amount of time spent on doing actual maintenance work. The purpose is to see
whether there is a difference in remote
areas and if it affects planned vs actual ratio. Below is what I got:
Overall, I am impressed with the ease of use, the responsiveness, and the level of interactivity of this new Map control in Dashboard. However, through this exercise, I found there are quite a number of limitations to this new map control:
Conditional Logic is the most important building block of any software development tool. WebMethods is not a programming language, but since we use it to build integration interface, which is also software, it means we are also programming with it. Writing a simple “If-Then-Else” condition in WebMethod is way too verbose to me though. The official tutorial on SoftwareAG teaches us to implement an if-then-else logic using the Branch, Sequence, and Map nodes as depicted in the sample below:
Recently, I
started playing with Azure by attempting to migrate a Maximo instance from my
local VM to Azure platform. Although the attempt was a success. I didn’t
realize SQL Server and Azure SQL are different databases (or more
correctly, two different versions). There were a few issues during the process,
but I figured out how to work around them and got Maximo running on Azure VM
and Azure SQL. After sharing the result on LinkedIn, there were some comments that
Maximo couldn’t be installed on Azure SQL and IBM doesn’t support it, so I
spent a bit more time digging and thought I should share the details and some
of my opinions on this matter.
First, let us be clear, Azure is a big cloud platform which offers many different services. I’m not a cloud expert, but from what I understand, we are talking about two main services:
I tried to
create a new Framework Manager project to build a package which I will join
some big Maximo tables (Assets, Workorder etc.) with some general
geo/demographical data I pulled from the Web. Framework Manager kept crashing
with this annoying error. After some quick search on the web, I realized the
issue with FM crashing is not uncommon, and there can be a thousand reasons for
that. To be honest, from the perspective of a software developer, most of these
are simple and stupid exceptions which should be caught or fixed easily by the
Cognos R&D team. Good software should give the end-users useful error messages
about what they did wrong. But anyway, this is not another post to complain, just
a quick note on another crash scenario so you can avoid:
