WebMethods: Evaluate String IN and CONTAINS operator

In WebMethods, the most basic way to write a string “IN” operator is to use Branch as follows:

Another way to reduce the number of lines of code is by combining the conditions using “OR”:

Troubleshoot integration issues when Maximo stops publishing data to external system.

I had to deal with this quite often. Most of the times, I got it right and able to identify the problem quickly. In a few cases, it took some time, and usually very stressful as it mostly occurs in Production. (It occurs in DEV and PRE-PROD all the time, it’s just that people usually don’t care, and it goes unnoticed)

Today I had to deal with it again and it took me some time. The cause was something I dealt with before, was told by a colleague on how to fix it (the easy way), but I forgot. This time around, under panic mode, I restarted a few JVMs before I remembered I should ask around and was reminded by my colleague again that it could be fixed with much less damage. I told myself I should write it down for the next time, so here is the sum of what I learned:

Setting up alarms for integration

 When writing a piece of software, we are in total control of the quality of the product. With integration, many elements are not under our control. Network and firewall are usually managed by IT. With external systems, we usually don’t know how they work, or many times, not given access. Yet, any changes to these elements can cause our interfaces to fail.

For synchronous interfaces, the user would receive instant feedback after each action is taken (e.g. Maximo - GIS integration), thus, we don’t usually need to setup alarms. For asynchronous interfaces, which usually run in the background, and don’t give instant feedback, when failure occurs, it usually goes unnoticed. In many cases, we only find out about failures after it has caused some major damage.

A good interface must provide adequate mechanism to handle failures, and in the case of async integration, proper alarms and reports should be setup so that failures are captured and handled proactively by IT and application administrators.

Avoiding recursion filter on Publish Channel

The standard way to send a message from Maximo to an external system is by setting up a Publish Channel and enabling Event Listener. By default, Integration Framework doesn’t re-publish a change if it comes from another inbound interface to prevent recursion on a bi-directional interface. Although I don’t agree with this logic as one-way integration is much more common, but anyway, IBM said it is easy to override that by extending the Event Filter javaclass.

The problem is, with the rise of automation script, no one wants java customization anymore. Of course, for massive systems where performance is critical, it is still the best choice. But, for most medium-sized clients I work with, they’re all moving away from java customization.

Anyway, an approach we can deal with this is not to use Event Listener at all. Instead, we can trigger a publish from an Object Save launch point from automation script using the example python code below:

from psdi.iface.mic import PublishChannelCache

PublishChannelCache.getInstance().getPublishChannel("PUBLISH_CHANNEL_NAME>").publish(mbo, True)

 

 Happy coding!

Check Network/Firewall Status using PowerShell

Working with Maximo, we have to deal with network/firewall all the time. I can spend a whole day telling you fun stories (or extremely frustrating experience) I had with IT/Network guys. But that's not the point. If you end up here, I guess you're having an issue with firewall. So below is a quick recap of my tricks:

- Ping: the first thing we try when we want to see if a server is accessible from our current machine. But don't jump to a conclusion too early if it shows the server is unreachable. Sometimes, the Network Admin has disabled ping response to enhance security. 

- Telnet: to check if a port is opened, we can use telnet from Windows Command console (e.g. telnet google.com 80). If it can be connected, means the target server is accessible on the specified port. But if it doesn't, first, make sure the server is listening on that port, before jumping to a conclusion that it's a Firewall issue. I made this mistake a few times, blaming the network, then it turned out it's Websphere/Maximo service is not running on the port that I assumed it should be running on

- PowerShell: in many cases, the server is not connected to the Internet, and Telnet is not installed, (and yes, you don't have permission to install new software either). We can use PowerShell to check network connectivity using the two commands below:

$connection = New-Object System.Net.Sockets.TcpClient("google.com", 80)

Write-Host $connection.Connected

The first line will return some errors if it cannot connect to the server, like the screenshot below: 

 If the server is accessible via the provided IP and port, the 2nd line will return the status = Connected

Common use cases for EAM mobile solutions

In some organisations, when starting a mobile project, the stakeholders may not have prior experience with mobility solutions for EAM, as such, we are sometimes asked to implement features that do not add value to the business. As consultants, it is satisfying to see something we implement being used and helps the end-users on the field. And nothing can be more frustrating than spending time building features that are not going to be used. In this post, I will list out based on my experience some commonly used and not used functions of a mobile app:

Work Execution: despite its name is Asset Management software, 80% of activities in Maximo happen around the work management process. It is not a surprise work execution is the number one use-case for a mobile app. However, work management is a big process with several major stages and many different activities. Only certain activities need to be recorded in the field with a mobile device. Below are some common ones:

A case for EzMaxMobile

I spend a large portion of my time working with mobile solutions, but I haven’t talked much on this topic. In this post, I will give a bit of praise to EzMaxMobile.

Why should you listen to me: I know a bit about mobile solutions for Maximo. I’ve done several (failed) pilots with the Maximo mobile suite (of the olden days). I’ve built a mobile app which is pretty successful and is being used by some large Oil & Gas operators. I have a bit of experience on a few small Anywhere projects, with Datasplice, and a few smaller home-grown apps.

Why shouldn’t you listen to me: the settings and the level of my involvement for each of the above projects/deployments are vastly different, as such, my opinion on this matter is heavily biased (toward EzMaxMobile).